Silicon carbide is an ideal material for high temperature applications, boasting both hardness and density while offering corrosion protection.
RSiC can be produced using slip casting, extrusion or injection molding techniques. With no pore-forming agents required and boasting high green densities that enable large-scale production of energy-saving kiln furniture and ceramic crucibles.
Structural Materials
Silicon Carbide (SiC) is an ideal material for many applications due to its superior mechanical, chemical, and thermal properties. Recrystallized SiC (RSiC), produced by heating a mixture of SiC powder with additives in an industrial furnace at high temperatures, offers even better properties than ordinary silicon carbide. RSiC’s unique microstructure gives it superior mechanical strength, hardness and wear resistance – while its low coefficient of thermal expansion makes it suitable for high temperature environments.
RSiC can also be utilized in other practical ways. For instance, it can be used to fabricate refractory kiln furniture that can be placed into tunnel kilns, shuttle kilns, and double roller kilns that fire porcelain ware, glass-ceramics and refractories – unlike cordite and mullite supports which may succumb to high temperatures and corrosion over time.
RSiC can be found in industrial furnaces as seals and heat exchangers, which must withstand high temperatures while bearing heavy loads. Furthermore, it’s used in making chemical equipment such as reactors and pipelines; its low temperature expansion helps avoid cracking or leakage at higher temperatures.
Porous Materials
Porous materials feature an increased surface area per volume, making them suitable for interactions with molecules and substances. As such, these materials are widely used for applications including gas adsorption, filtration and catalysis – with their pores customizable according to specific needs, making selective adsorption possible.
Porous SiC is widely utilized due to its excellent thermal conductivity, making it suitable for honeycomb ceramics used in solar power towers that convert sunlight into electricity. Furthermore, its excellent oxidation resistance and thermal shock resistance enable its use even at higher temperatures.
Doping porous sic with various additives such as C, N2, V and Be can alter its electrical properties by creating energy levels near its bandgap while decreasing electrical resistivity.
Current efforts involve developing a structural model for porous SiC, which will facilitate various physical and mechanical analyses to be undertaken. It is based on an octahedron with body-centered cubic mode. By endowing different physical concepts to this model, structural property analysis models and mathematical relations can be created; ultimately opening up various practical applications of Porous SiC with controlled electrical resistivity.
Heat Exchangers
Silicon carbide is widely used as an ideal material for heat exchangers in applications with extreme temperatures, as its resistance to corrosion makes it the perfect material to transfer corrosive liquids.
Gelcasting, infiltration and infusion are all suitable processes to produce RSiC components with uniform microstructure and complex shapes. Gelcasting offers one approach that produces complex shapes with uniform microstructure while infiltration offers another one for increasing green density and flexural strength of components made of RSiC. Furthermore, its amorphous structure protects it from high temperature oxidation while improving mechanical properties.
RSiC can be used to manufacture heat exchangers that are resistant to corrosion and abrasion, making them suitable for various industries including coal power generation and oil refining. Furthermore, solar energy towers make use of this material by converting sunlight into electricity while shot blast nozzles provide surface preparation and finishing applications.
Block heat exchangers, another application of RSiC technology, allow the transfer of heat between systems without direct contact between fluids. This technology can enhance a system’s energy efficiency by diverting heat that would otherwise be lost into other areas that need it. Block heat exchangers come in various sizes and materials such as silicon carbide, carbon, nitrides, silicates and borides to meet specific application needs.
Electrical Functional Materials
Functional materials are materials designed to fulfill specific functions in response to certain stimuli, such as piezoelectrics that deform when subjected to electrical signals or ferroelectrics which generate electric current when polarized. Other examples of functional materials are magnetocaloric materials which change their magnetic properties when temperature fluctuates and solar harvesting materials that convert solar energy into electricity.
Recrystallized sic’s unique microstructure makes it an excellent material for producing functional materials. This is due to its excellent mechanical, thermal and electrical properties compared to other SiC materials; moreover, its superior oxidation resistance and ability to withstand high temperatures makes it suitable for fabricating kiln furniture such as burners and thermocouple protection tubes used in tunnel, shuttle and double roller kilns for firing porcelain ware, sanitary ceramics and glass-ceramics.
We have developed an innovative process for producing porous SiC ceramics with controlled electrical resistivity. This is accomplished by adding secondary phases during sintering that consume and react with b-SiC particles in the sintering chamber to form an interconnected network structure of pure and large a-SiC grains – this technique eliminates polytype effects while opening new opportunities to design functional materials based on cheaper alternatives to b-SiC.
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