Deformation Treatment in Spark Plasma Sintering Equipment and Properties of AlON-based Ceramic

Spark plasma sintering is used to study superplastic deformation of AlON-based ceramic. Strain rates of 0.4 10 and 1.65 10 –3 s –1 are achieved on AlON specimens deformed at 1700 and 1800 °C, respectively. As a result, dense specimens are obtained with hardness ~15 GPa and optical transmittance ~18.3% at 5 μm wavelength. The AlON specimens deformed at 1700 °C exhibits high wear resistance and compatibility with ZrO 2 , Al 2 O 3 , and Si 3 N 4 counterbodies. For AlON specimens, wear is practically absent both in static and dynamic loading regimes and correlates well with a surface roughness. The wear mechanisms alter from polishing to abrasive and from adhesive to abrasive for the AlON-ZrO 2 and AlON-Si 3 N 4 pairs, respectively, depending on the test conditions and the type of loading. For the AlON-Al 2 O 3 pair, an abrasive wear is found to be the only active wear mechanism.