In recent years heavy rare earth oxides have been investigated as sinter additives in the liquid phase sintering of silicon nitride, Si3N4. This work reports on comparative sintering experiments of Si3N4 with yttria/silica and rare earth oxide concentrate/silica additions. The additive contents used were 14 and 21 vol%. The influence of pure oxide additions was compared to that of pre-reacted disilicates. The experiments were conducted using high temperature dilatometry and the results are presented in terms of the linear shrinkage and the rate of shrinkage. It was verified that the samples with higher additive content showed higher shrinkage as well as higher shrinkage rates. For samples doped with 14 and 21% of Y2O3/SiO2 additives, the shrinkage was 13,1 and 15,5% respectively and for samples doped with the same amounts of rare earth oxide concentrate/SiO2, 13,7 and 15,7% respectively. Furthermore, higher shrinkages and shrinkage rates have been observed for samples with pre-reacted disilicate additions, when compared to samples with separate oxide additions. In all cases, samples with rare earth oxide concentrate as sinter additive presented higher shrinkages and shrinkage rates in comparison to the correspondent samples with Y2O3 additions.
Silicon nitride; sintering; dilatometry; rare earth
