Tough TiB2-Based Ceramic Composites Using Metallic Glass Powder as the Sintering Aid

In this work, the authors report on the formation of toughened TiB2-based ceramic composites using Ti60.8Al25Nb10V3Mo1B0.2 (at%) metallic glass powder as sintering aid fabricated by spark plasma sintering. The TiB2 ceramic powder blended with 5 wt% metallic glass sintering aid exhibits an interesting sigmoidal shrinkage behavior which is argued to be attributable to the viscous flow of metallic glass powder. The fabricated TiB2-based ceramic composites have high relative density of 99.1% and high fracture toughness of 9.9 Mpa m(1/2). The fracture toughness values obtained in this study are related to the mechanical response of the TiAl phase, which transformed from the metallic glass sintering aid. The results obtained herein provide a novel pathway for the fabrication of high-performance ceramic composites