Synthesis of tubular silicon carbide (SiC) from a carbon-silica material by using a reactive replica technique: mechanism of formation of SiC

A non-conventional preparation way to synthesize a tubular silicon carbide material from carbon fibres by a reactive templating process is presented in this paper. By this way, SiC materials keeping the morphology of the carbon source can be obtained. Particular attention has been paid in this paper to the mechanism of formation of SiC which occurs via a two stages process. In particular, the kinetics of formation of SiC, the structural and textural morphology of the final SiC material have been explained in relationship with the chemical surface properties of the carbon source characterized by the active surface area. The formation of SiC has been also followed by several muti-scale characterization techniques.