| Abstract Scope |
Transparent polycrystalline ceramics provides flexibility in size and shape design to apply for a wide field. Extremely low porosities are indispensable for high transparency. Colloidal processing is a very effective technique for controlling the pore size distribution in green compacts before densification by sintering. The green compacts having small residual pores with a narrow size distribution is expected to enhance the densification at low sintering temperature. Furthermore, spark plasma sintering (SPS) is also effective way for densification in low sintering temperature. In this presentation, this processing was applied to fabrication of transparent AlON. After slip casting of the mixture of alumina and AlN, transparent AlON was obtained by reactive sintering during SPS. In the case of alumina and AlN, the crystallographic orientation was controlled for improvement of transparency, because orientation prevent the birefringence due to anisotropic crystal structure. |