Fabrication Of Porous Ceramics Based On The Structures Of Textile Spacer Fabrics

A novel porous ceramic was first fabricated by warp-knitted spacer fabric's slurry infiltration process. The spacer fabric was composed of two surface layers and a middle spacer layer. Hexagonal meshes were on two surface layers, which were connected by single yarns of the middle layer. The spacer fabric had three-dimensional anisotropic well-controlled pore structures, which also were the characteristics of obtained porous ceramic. The texture, thermogravimetry, flexibility, compressibility, and slurry absorption of the spacer fabric were analyzed. It indicated that the spacer fabric may be chosen as an organic template. Three different slurry coating processes were compared according to the number and steps of coatings. It revealed that one coating process was suitable for the spacer fabric template. The macro- and micro- structures of the obtained porous ceramics were examined with optical camera, a microscope and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). With winebottle ceramic slurry(a kind of common ceramic slurry), the sintered body showed almost full densification at 1200℃and a linear shrinkage of～10% was observed after sintering. The sizes of the obtained macropores were mainly varied between 1 and 5 mm. The compressive strength of obtained porous ceramics achieved 2.7 MPa while the bending strength might be 7 MPa.