High-purity transition metal borides: promising materials for present-day technology

Data on structure of metal borides and their properties are presented. main methods of boride preparation are considered. It is shown that plasma-arc remelting of transition metal diborides provides the effective purification with preservation of composition, similar to stoichiometric one. Some electric characteristics, microhardness anisotropy and anisotropy of elasticity modulus were measured for high-pure monocrystalline samples of titanium and niobium borides. 10 refs.; 2 figs.; 5 tabs