Boron carbide is a hard black ceramic material with metallic luster that is chemically resistant and capable of withstanding strong impacts and shock. Additionally, boron carbide ceramic is low density, high Hugoniot elastic limit and exceptional wear resistance makes it suitable for use in nuclear reactors.
Hardness
Boron Carbide (B4C), commonly referred to as black diamond, is an exceptionally hard and durable black crystalline compound composed of boron and carbon. It ranks second only to diamond on Mohs scale hardness for hardness; additionally it offers resistance against abrasion with its high melting point, low density, good thermal stability and chemical resistance as well as exceptional wear resistance properties.
B4C is produced in electric arc furnaces using boron trioxide and carbon or magnesium at very high temperatures, creating an approximate 4:1 stoichiometry with carbon atoms randomly scattered around boron atoms to form an icosahedron structure.
B4C material in its green or biscuit forms can be easily machined into complex geometries, but for tight tolerances it must first be fully sintered - this process causes approximately 20% shrinkage of material which becomes much harder for conventional tools to machine than when in its green/biscuit state.
Fiven has developed a special production method to address this problem and produce the highest-grade boron carbide powder available. Their innovative chemistry prevents free carbon from being formed into graphite during storage or transportation and produces consistent high purity ceramic powders made of boron carbide.
Powders are combined with an appropriate binder and extruded into pellets, which can then be cut to size and shaped to form components with complex shapes that range in size from small to very large.
Our production process allows us to create various boron carbide ceramics. Examples of such include:
DuraShock is a ceramic composite composed of boron carbide and silicon carbide that was designed to deliver optimal ballistic performance while being as lightweight as possible. Available at different velocity settings and suitable for use both armament systems as well as protective vests, its aim is to deliver maximum effectiveness with minimum effort.
boron carbide ceramic is the main component of body armor, abrasion- and wear-resistant products and specialty items made with it. Due to its very low density, the material also makes an appealing material choice for designers of personnel protection equipment and airborne protection items like manned aircraft or helicopters. Other applications of B4C include high wear blasting nozzles as well as ceramic tooling dies - not forgetting its neutron absorption properties making it valuable in nuclear reactors for shielding rods and control rods.
Wear Resistance
Boron carbide (B4C), among technical ceramics, offers an exceptional combination of hardness and low density that makes it suitable for applications requiring abrasive resistance. Sintering B4C powder allows the creation of ceramic tools and wear-resistant coatings; additionally, its ability to withstand high temperatures and chemicals make it suitable for nuclear power, aerospace, and abrasive manufacturing industries.
B4C is one of the hardest materials known to man, second only to cubic boron nitride. Additionally, its density and strength-to-weight ratio make it ideal for applications involving high levels of impact resistance such as sandblasting, lapping or grinding ultrahard metals such as carbon steels. Furthermore, B4C's excellent abrasive resistance makes it suitable for use as protective plates on tanks or armored vehicles for defense & ballistic uses.
Boron carbide stands out for its impressive temperature stability; in fact, it is one of the only technical ceramics capable of withstanding temperatures beyond 2000degC without suffering mechanical properties loss. Furthermore, B4C boasts excellent corrosion resistance with outstanding acid and alkali resistance capabilities as well as thermal shock resistance with very minimal coefficient of expansion.
However, it should be remembered that despite its excellent properties, boron carbide does have certain drawbacks that limit large-scale application. These include its low fracture toughness and high sintering temperature (2300degC). Other shortcomings include limited chemical resistance, poor air oxidation resistance (it starts oxidizing at 1000degC), instability with most metals (it reacts with them to form metallic borides), as well as its poor oxidation resistance in air (it begins oxidizing at 1000degC).
These limitations can be addressed using advanced, flexible production methods such as die casting or isostatic pressing, which provide manufacturers with tools for creating components with close tolerances and dimensional accuracy, with high levels of boron purity for ballistic protection or nuclear applications, plus these techniques are capable of creating components of many shapes and sizes.
Thermal Stability
Boron Carbide ceramic is exceptional engineering materials with the highest melting point and second highest hardness among engineering materials. Additionally, this p-type semiconductor features outstanding thermal conductivity; however, its relatively low fracture toughness and brittleness limit its application in fields like bulletproof armor or high temperature chemical equipment. Strengthening and toughening methods should therefore be explored further to make boron carbide ceramics more practical engineering materials.
Boroni Carbide stands out among technical ceramics for its high melting point and best wear resistance compared to its peers; as well as nuclear capture capability (making it one of the key materials used in protective plate production). As such, its versatile industrial applications and lightweight and ballistic performance makes boron carbide an attractive material choice that makes an impactful statement about modern society. Furthermore, its light weight and superior ballistic performance makes boron Carbide an attractive material choice for lightweight body armor use and other defense & ballistic uses.
Boron carbide ceramic is one of the world's most advanced and promising technical ceramics due to its many unique properties such as its superhardness (second only to diamond), extremely low density, chemical stability, and neutron absorption capabilities.
However, its remarkable properties have been curtailed by difficulty in producing monolithic boron carbide ceramics with high densities. This is because boron carbide exhibits low self-diffusion coefficient due to strong covalent bonding between its atoms, leading to very low plasticity and resistance against grain boundary sliding during sintering processes, making production of high density products via hot pressing difficult.
Thanks to recent technological advancements, hip sintering technology now makes it possible to produce dense boron carbide at high densities with unprecedented accuracy. In this process, inert gases such as N2 or Ar are used as inert pressure carriers on powder sintering materials in order to reduce temperature and prevent grain growth - creating uniform microstructure and high bending strength boron carbides with precise chemical composition control. Furthermore, hip sintering ceramics produced via hip sintering will increasingly be employed for producing close tolerance and dimensionally accurate parts.
Neutron Absorption
Boron carbide ceramic has become an invaluable asset to the nuclear industry due to their excellent neutron absorption abilities. Unlike ions, neutrons do not carry charges and can penetrate further into materials before colliding with nuclei to form radioactive products - which makes boron carbide an ideal material choice for use as nuclear reactor material - including applications like control rods and shut down pellets.
Boron carbide ceramics have numerous outstanding characteristics beyond hardness and wear resistance, including low density, thermal expansion, acid and corrosion resistance, good electrical conductivity, and good electrical resistivity. Due to these qualities, boron carbide ceramics have found wide use across a range of fields such as metallurgy, chemical engineering, physics and electronics.
Boron carbide stands out among materials because of its resistance to strong acids and alkalis solutions, and high temperature strength as well as good mechanical properties like abrasion resistance and fatigue resistance. Due to these characteristics, boron carbide makes an excellent material choice for cutting tools like milling cutters and drill bits as well as manifolds used in aerospace technology.
Boron carbide does have some disadvantages that limit its use in industrial applications. These include its difficult machining due to a high sintering temperature (2300degC), poor fracture toughness, slow oxidation (begins to occur at 600degC), and weak chemical stability with metals (reacts with most metals to form metallic borides), particularly bulk materials.
Fiven has developed a proprietary process for producing boron carbide powder that resists oxidation and remains stable under high temperatures, to enhance our ceramics and lower costs.
Fiven has developed a scalable technique for producing MXene/B4C hybrid films with uniform and highly effective neutron shielding properties, using highly conductive 2D Ti3C2Tx MXene flakes incorporated in a lightweight shape-controllable and structurally stable boron carbide composite material. These neutron-shielding ceramic composites make an excellent solution for both military and civil protection applications.