Preparation of TiC ceramics from hot Ti-bearing blast furnace slag: Carbothermal reduction, supergravity separation and spark plasma sintering

TiC ceramics, a kind of ultra-high temperature ceramics, are primarily prepared by the synthesized TiC powders from high purity metallic titanium or titania. In this work, a novel method for sustainable utilization of hot Tibearing blast furnace slag to prepare TiC ceramics was developed. Firstly, the Ti was efficiently transformed into the TiC in hot Ti-bearing blast furnace slag through carbothermal reduction. The high-purity TiC powders were fully recovered from molten carbonized Ti-bearing slag through supergravity separation, where the mass fraction and recovery ratio of Ti in TiC powders were up to 77.89 wt.% and 95.58 %. The TiC ceramics with a relative density of 98.23 % were prepared from the recovered TiC powders via spark plasma sintering method, which possess the favourable mechanical properties including Vickers hardness (Hv) of 23.3 +/- 0.4 GPa, fracture toughness (KIC) of 3.96 +/- 0.24 MPa m1/2 and flexural strength of 371.9 +/- 15.4 MPa.