Iw. Hall et al., EXPERIMENTAL APPROACHES TO SIMULATING INTERFACIAL REACTIONS IN METAL-MATRIX COMPOSITES, Metallurgical and materials transactions. A, Physical metallurgy andmaterials science, 29(4), 1998, pp. 1347-1355
Samples of a titanium aluminide have been subjected to treatments desi
gned to simulate their contact with the protective layer of a commerci
al silicon carbide fiber; such contact occurs during fabrication of ac
tual metal matrix composites (MMCs), The first treatment consisted of
immersion of the matrix material in a powder mixture, the composition
of which corresponded to that of the protective layer of the fiber. Th
e second method was the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of such a laye
r. Subsequent isothermal exposure treatments showed that these methods
produced interfacial reaction layers which very closely resembled the
layers present in actual composites. It is concluded that approaches
such as these are viable methods for evaluating the efficiency of pote
ntial coatings or surface modifications without the necessity of perfo
rming full-scale composite fabrication tests.