Use of mechanical alloying and subsequent annealing for obtaining intermetallic compound Cu[Al.sub.2]

The possibility of obtaining a "line" (narrow-homogeneity-range) intermetallic compound Cu[Al.sub.2] with the use of mechanical alloying (MA) and subsequent annealing has been investigated by X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy. Regimes (composition of a charge mixture, time of preliminary MA, time and temperature of annealing) allowing one to obtain a virtually single-phase compound have been determined. The low-temperature annealings in a temperature range of 100-250[degrees]C have shown that the most probable mechanism of mass transfer upon heating of layered composites obtained by MA is grain-boundary diffusion, which can be explained by a large fraction of grain boundaries in mechanically alloyed powders. Keywords: mechanical alloying, phase transformations, X-ray diffraction analysis, scanning electron microscopy DOI: 10.1134/S0031918X11010364