Preparation and characterization of ceramic-metal composites obtained by reactive metal penetration and reactive infiltration of ceramic preforms

The experiments performed in this work demonstrate that under the applied conditions (four hours at 1200 K in a nitrogen atmosphere) various porous and dense ceramic performs made of quartz sand, sintered amorphous silica, boron carbide powder and silicon nitride sintered ceramic can be successfully infiltrated and reactively penetrated by Al-5 Mg and Mg melts. In addition to thermodynamic understanding of ceramic-metal composite formation, a particular objective was to investigate and verify experimentally how reactivity and transport phenomena affect the microstructure and the continuity of phases in obtained ceramic-metal composites.