Hot Pressing of Pure Borides

Tables 1-5 give the hot-pressing characteristics of pure borides.

Reaction between elemental boron and metal powder is the simplest route to produce boride powder. It can have excellent control on the stoichiometry of the resultant boride. Although this route results in pure ZrB /HfB but cannot be employed for industrial production because the starting materials used are expensive. This route can be exploited to get dense shapes of borides by hot pressing or spark plasma sintering of mixed powder (metal and boron), if the reaction with die is avoided (Tamburini et al., 2008). To avoid any reaction with the die, the graphite die is coated with boron nitride. 

---