Fabrication of Carbon Nanotube - Chromium Carbide Composite Through Laser Sintering

Ceramics often have high hardness and strength, and good wear and corro- sion resistance, and hence have many important applications, which, however, are often limited by their poor fracture toughness. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) may enhance ceramic fracture toughness, but hot pressing (which is one typical approach of fabri- cating CNT-ceramic composites) is difficult to apply for applications that require localized heat input, such as fabricating composites as surface coatings. Laser beam may realize localized material sintering with little thermal effect on the surrounding regions. However, for the typical ceramics for hard coating applications (as listed in Ref.(1)), previous work on laser sintering of CNT-ceramic composites with mechanical property characterizations has been very limited. In this paper, research work has been reported on the fabrication and characterization of CNT-ceramic composites through laser sintering of mixtures of CNTs and chromium carbide powders. Under the studied conditions, it has been found that laser-sintered composites have a much higher hardness than that for plasma-sprayed composites reported in the literature. It has also been found that the composites obtained by laser sintering of CNTs and chromium