Production of a High Purity Ceramic Powder

Objective: The topic seeks to enable the scale up for the production of a ceramic powder with a production rate of at least one (1) metric ton per year. The powder composition to be specified by the Air Force must retain a high level of homogeneity and purity. Description: The Air Force has developed a route to a ceramic powder of interest. The Air Force has demonstrated within its laboratories that the process can be scaled to 1 kg batches. Quality control for powder production has been established via ICP-OES/ICP-MS, XRD, SEM cross section of powder green bodies, and TEM with EDS analysis. ICP has been used to analyze for trace impurities and stoichiometric purity. SEM and TEM are used to analyze secondary phase content. At the laboratory scale the powder is at >99.9% pure of contaminates and is within 99% of the desired stoichiometry. Secondary phase presence is <3% by XRD with feature sizes of secondary phases are required to be <100 nm in particle size and <3% present. Powder production involves reverse strike co-precipitation and hydrothermal synthesis. Traditional solid phase synthesis methods are not suitable for a direct to phase II effort. The powder has shown interesting properties in trial studies, and scale up studies need to be conducted. Production rate needs to be demonstrated significantly beyond what our lab is equipped to do (20x increase in rate). Keywords: ceramic powder; reverse strike co-precipitation; hydrothermal synthesis; scale up chemistry; ceramic synthesis CMMC Level: Level 2 (Self)