Mechanical Strength of Alumina Compacts Lubricated with Poly (methacrylic acid esters) Copolymers

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a rapid development in research on high performance ceramics for mechanical, electrical and medical industries. This development will be shown for alumina as a representative for oxide ceramics powders.
Dry–pressing forming technique was used to prepare different ceramic compacts for alumina grafted by polymethacrylate polymers. All Alumina compact were fired firstly at 1200 ◌ْ C, then
at 1600 ◌ْ C.
Mechanical strength was examined in different means, some
depends on compression and other depends on impact. Hardness was
also measured .The results obtained were compared with that of
Alumina compact prepared under the same condition from Alumina
especially made for pressing .
The results revealed that the compacts lubricated with polymethacrylate copolymers had higher mechanical properties than that prepared from Alumina made especially for pressing, reflecting the good capability of those polymers to act as lubricant for Alumina particles, this was supported by scanning electron microscope