Porosity and mechanical properties of zirconium ceramics

Has been studied a porous ceramics obtained from ultra-fine powders. Porous ceramic ZrO₂(MgO), ZrO₂(Y₂O₃) powder was prepared by pressing and subsequent sintering of compacts homologous temperatures ranging from 0.63 to 0.56 during the isothermal holding duration of 1 to 5 hours. The porosity of ceramic samples was from 15 to 80%. The structure of the ceramic materials produced from plasma-sprayed ZrO₂ powder was represented as a system of cell and rod structure elements. Cellular structure formed by stacking hollow powder particles can be easily seen at the images of fracture surfaces of obtained ceramics. There were three types of pores in ceramics: large cellular hollow spaces, small interparticle pores which are not filled with powder particles and the smallest pores in the shells of cells. The cells generally did not have regular shapes. The size of the interior of the cells many times exceeded the thickness of the walls which was a single-layer packing of ZrO₂ grains. A distinctive feature of all deformation diagrams obtained in the experiment was their nonlinearity at low deformations which was described by the parabolic law. It was shown that the observed nonlinear elasticity for low deformation on deformation diagrams is due to mechanical instability of the cellular elements in the ceramic carcass.