No abstract

No abstract

It is commonly known that the properties of sintered materials are strongly related to technological conditions of the densification process. This paper shows the sintering behavior of a NiAl-Al 2 O 3 composite, and its individual components sintered separately. Each kind of material was processed via the powder metallurgy route (hot pressing). The progress of sintering at different stages of the process was tested. Changes in the microstructure were examined using scanning and transmission electron microscopy. Metal-ceramics interface was clean and no additional phases were detected. Correlation between the microstructure, density, and mechanical properties of the sintered materials was analyzed. The values of elastic constants of NiAl/Al 2 O 3 were close to intermetallic ones due to the volume content of the NiAl phase particularly at low densities, where small alumina particles had no impact on the compositeÕs stiffness. The influence of the external pressure of 30 MPa seemed crucial for obtaining satisfactory stiffness for three kinds of the studied materials which were characterized by a high dense microstructure with a low number of isolated spherical pores.

No abstract

The influence of hot pressing conditions on mechanical properties of nickel aluminide/alumina composite has been investigated in the present paper. In particular, effect of the process parameters, viz. compacting pressure, sintering temperature and sintering time on the evolution of density, elastic constants and tensile strength properties of the intermetallic-ceramic composite has been studied. Elastic constants, the Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio, have been evaluated using an ultrasonic testing method, and the tensile strength has been determined by a Brazilian-type splitting test. Microscopic observations of microstructure evolution complemented the experimental procedure. Experimental results have been confronted with theoretical models showing a good agreement between the data compared.

No abstract

Damage due to creep and plastic flow is assessed using destructive and non-destructive methods in steels (40HNMA and P91). In the destructive methods the standard tension tests were carried out after prestraining and variations of the selected tension parameters were taken into account for damage identification. In order to assess a damage development during the creep and plastic deformation the tests for both steels were interrupted for a range of the selected strain magnitudes. The ultrasonic and magnetic techniques were used as the non-destructive methods for damage evaluation. The last step of the experimental programme contained microscopic observations. A very promising correlation between parameters of methods for damage development evaluation was achieved. It is well proved for the ultimate tensile stress and birefringence coefficient.

No abstract