Papers by Author: Koji Morita

Abstract: In order to fabricate fine-grained and dense nanoceramic materials, the effect of spark-plasma-sintering (SPS) conditions was examined in MgAl₂O₄ spinel as a reference material. The SPS conditions, such as heating rate and loading temperature, strongly affected the microstructures. Although the density can be improved with decreasing the heating rate to less than 10 °C/min, it requires a long processing time. In order to fully utilize the high heating rate that is a primary advantage of the SPS technique, load controlling is very effective to achieve high density with maintaining fine grain size. An increase in the loading temperature during SPS processing can reduce the residual porosity in a spinel even at the widely used high heating rate of 100 °C/min. This suggests that for the SPS processing in ceramics, the load controlling is an important factor as well as the heating rate and sintering temperature.

Abstract: The densification mechanism during the park-plasma-sintering (SPS) processing was examined in high purity MgAl2O4 spinel. As the density ρt increases, that is, as the effective stress σeff decreases, stress exponent n evaluated from σeff dependence of densification rate varies from n ≥ 4 in the low ρt region, n ≈ 2 in the intermediate ρt region to n ≈ 1 in the high ρt region. TEM observation shows that significant stacking faults caused by partial dislocations are observed in the low ρt region, but limited in the high ρt region. The ρt dependent densification behavior and microstructure suggest that the predominant densification mechanism during the SPS processing changes with ρt from plastic flow by partial dislocation motion for the low ρt region (n ≥ 4) to diffusion-related creep for the high ρt region (n ≈ 1).