Anisotropic shrinkage characteristics of tape cast alumina

Dimensional control during sintering is a major issue in ceramics processing to avoid high post-sintering costs associated with machining of the fired ceramic part to desired tolerances and dimensions. Ceramic forming processes such as tape casting, injection molding, and extrusion involve shear of anisotropic particles resulting in preferential alignment of the particles in the green body. This preferential alignment causes directionality in mechanical, electrical, optical, and magnetic properties and most importantly warpage or distortion during sintering. A large effort has been devoted to synthesizing ceramic green bodies with minimal density gradients and uniform packing and modeling the sintering behavior evolution but little effort has been devoted to characterizing orientation of particles and the effect of preferential alignment on sintering shrinkage anisotropy.; A systematic study was initiated to study the effect of processing variables such as shear rate, solids loading, temperature, and binder content on aqueous tape cast alumina. Three different alumina systems: A16-SG, Baikowski RC-UFX DBM and RC-LS DBM were investigated. Aqueous tapes of high solids loading alumina (56 vol. %) were tape cast at various speeds and thicknesses and assuming plane Couette flow a shear rate regime of 21–270 s−1 was investigated. Higher shear rates and high solids loading resulted in higher in-plane anisotropy whereas the anisotropy in the thickness direction was higher for low solids loading systems. The anisotropy was found to be fairly constant above a certain critical shear rate (∼100 s−1) irrespective of the temperature and the solids loading and this correlated with the viscosity-shear rate relationship of the cast slips. The higher shrinkage anisotropy in the thickness direction for the low solids loading systems (35 and 45 vol. %) was attributed to the higher amount of organics in the slip required to sustain the suitable viscosity for tape casting and subsequently the strains associated with binder removal. The sintering rate in the thickness direction was significantly higher. This was attributed to more number of necks resulting from platy nature of alumina particles and the strains associated with binder removal. SEM images in the thickness direction after intermediate levels of sintering clearly revealed that the particles become more isotropic much earlier as compared to the in-plane direction. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...