Zirconia–Alumina Ceramic Composites with Extremely High Wear Resistance

✍ Scribed by B. Kerkwijk; E. Mulder; H. Verweij

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 548 KB
• Volume: 1
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1438-1656
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1527-2648(199909)1:1<69::aid-adem69>3.0.co;2-2

✦ Synopsis

Wear and friction are often minimized at sliding contacts in moving equipment parts by the use of lubricants. These lubricants become more and more unwanted for environmental and maintenance reasons. This causes an increased interest in the development of ceramic materials with stable sliding contacts under dry, unlubricated conditions. In this study an improvement in wear resistance of more than three orders of magnitude has been achieved under the most severe testing conditions with very homogeneously structured, dense, and fine-grained ceramic composites consisting of 11 vol.-% ZrO 2 and 89 vol.-% a-Al 2 O 3 . These composites are prepared by controlled packing of colloidal particles followed by sintering. Self-mating, dry-sliding wear tests at contact pressures of up to 1.7 GPa revealed low coefficients of friction (0.43), whereas wear only occurred by polishing.

Normally, severe wear is caused by local-contact surface roughening from the breakout of pieces of material and is promoted by the following