Carbon silicon carbide-based materials

The traditional TPS for launcher fairings and re-entry capsules consists of an external ablative insulation, fixed or bonded onto a metallic primary structure. Ablative materials are based on thermosets (phenolic and epoxy resins) or elastomers (ethylene-propylene and silicone rubbers) usually filled and reinforced with cork, cotton, glass, silica, quartz, carbon, silicon carbide, nylon and aramid in the form of powders, fibres, fabrics and felt (Table 2). 

One can classify fibers in a variety of ways. For example, one may divide the whole field of fibers into apparel and nonapparel fibers, i.e. based upon the final use of fibrous material. The apparel fibers include synthetic fibers such as nylon, polyester, spandex, and natural fibers such as cotton, jute, sisal, ramie, silk, etc. Nonapparel fibers include aramid, polyethylene, steel, copper, carbon, glass, silicon carbide, and alumina. These nonapparel fibers are used for making cords and ropes, geotextiles, and structural applications such as fiber reinforcements... 

Summary Polysilacarbosilanes and polysilasilazanes prepared according to a copolymer strategy offer an easy, coherent approach to polycarbosilanes and silazanes, precursors of SiC and SiCN-based materials with variable C/Si and C/Si/N ratios. In contrast with the polysilazane route which leads, upon pyrolysis, to carbon-containing silicon nitride, the synthesized polycarbosilazanes are finally converted into nitrogen-containing silicon carbide. 

The preparation, manufacture, and reactions of SiC have been discussed in detail in Gmelin, as have the electrical, mechanical, and other properties of both crystalline and amorphous of SiC. Silicon carbide results from the pyrolysis of a wide range of materials containing both silicon and carbon but it is manufactured on a large scale by the reduction of quartz in the presence of an excess of carbon (in the form of anthracite or coke), (Scheme 60), and more recently by the pyrolysis of polysilanes or polycarbosUanes (for a review, see Reference 291). Although it has a simple empirical formula, silicon carbide exists in at least 70 different crystalline forms based on either the hexagonal wurtzite (ZnS) structme a-SiC, or the cubic diamond (zinc blende) structme /3-SiC. The structmes differ in the way that the layers of atoms are stacked, with Si being fom-coordinate in all cases. 

Many body potentials e.g. Sutton-Chen, Tersoff, " Brenner can be used to describe metals and other continuous solids such as silicon and carbon. The Brenner potential has been particularly successful with fullerenes, carbon nanotubes and diamond. Erhart and Albe have derived an analytical potential based on Brenner s work for carbon, silicon and silicon carbide. The Brenner and Tersolf potentials are examples of bond order potentials. These express the local binding energy between any pair of atoms/ions as the sum of a repulsive term and an attractive term that depends on the bond order between the two atoms. Because the bond order depends on the other neighbours of the two atoms, this apparently two-body potential is in fact many-body. An introduction and history of such potentials has recently been given by Finnis in an issue of Progress in Materials Science dedicated to David Pettifor. For a study of solid and liquid MgO Tangney and Scandolo derived a many body potential for ionic systems. 

We carried out comparative studies of the effect of the porous structure of carbon materials on electrochemical electrode characteristics using various carbide carbons (CCs). Main structural characteristics for CCs based on silicon carbide are presented in Table 27.3 and those for titanium carbide are in Table 27.4. Specific surface areas were calculated on the basis of the nitrogen adsorption data with calculation using the DFT technique. This method is used to measure micropores and mesopores, but not macropores. 

Nanoporous SiC-based materials are difficult to obtain due to the high formation temperature. Disordered nanoporous silicon carbide ceramics can be fabricated by a solid-gas reaction of ordered mesoporous carbon replica with silicon vapor [82], and a chemical vapor infiltration of dimethyldichlorosilane inside mesoporous silica following by the removal of silica [83]. Recently, highly ordered mesoporous SiC materials with uniform pore sizes and ultralarge surface areas have been synthesized by fully impregnating polycarbosilane... 

Superhard compounds are obviously formed by a combination of the low atomic number elements boron, carbon, silicon, and nitrogen. Carbon-carbon as diamond, boron-nitrogen as cubic boron nitride, boron-carbon as boron carbide, and silicon-carbon as silicon carbide, belong to the hardest materials hitherto known. Because of their extreme properties and the variety of present and potential commercial applications, silicon carbide (SiC) and boron carbide (B4C) are, besides tungsten carbide-based hard metals, considered by many as the most important carbide materials. 

The physical and mechanical properties of zirconia based fibers are not sufficiently known, Inasmuch as high performance continuous fibers are not available from the market and experimental materials are scarce. The applications for ceramic oxide fibers are discussed in Chapter 12, along with related applications of carbon and silicon carbide fibers. 

Rocher JP, Quenisset JM, Naslain R, Wetting improvement of carbon or silicon carbide by aluminum alloys based on a K2Zrp6 surface treatment Application to composite material casting, J Mater Sci, 24, 2697, 1989. 

Kim, E. S. Lee, T. H. Shin, S. H. Yoon, J.-S., Effect of Incorporation of Carbon Fiber and Silicon Carbide Powders Into Silicone Rubber on the Ablation and Mechanical Properties of the Silicone Rubber-Based Ablation Material. 

Porous Ceramics Novel Developments and Applications International Symposium on Silicon Carbide and Carbon-Based Materials for Fusion and Advanced Nuclear Energy Applications... 

---