Effect of surface finishing and heat treatments on the mechanical strength of sintered alumina

The effect of surface finishing on the mechanical strength of two pure aluminas, one of self-production and another a commercial one, is studied. Three types of finishings: as-sintered, as machined and as-machined with thermal treatment were studied. It was verified that the as-machined alumina is about 50 percent stronger than the as-sintered one, and that a thermal treatment increases even more the mechanical strength of the sintered alumina. The effect of the volume and pressing direction on mechanical strength was studied. The kinetics of crack healing was determined from a series of systematically selected thermal treatments with annealing temperatures between 12000C and 16000C. It was verified that a recently developed theoretical model for crack healing can describe the experimental results; using this model a value for the activation energy of the process of 715 kJ/mcl was obtained, which suggests that crack healing is promoted by volume diffusion. The material behavior under subcritical crack growth action was also studied, and a value of about 40 for the subcritical crack growth exponent N from dynamic loading tests in water was found. A fractographic study intended to localize and measure the flaws that originated the fracture of the tested specimens was performed; the measured flaw sizes were compared with the flaw size calculated from the values of the measured mechanical strength; in this comparison an excellent agreement was observed. (Author)