Low temperature processing of nano-sized magnesia ceramics using ultra high pressure

We performed high pressure high temperature (HPHT) sintering for the 20 nm MgO powders at the temperatures from 600 °C to 1200 °C for only 5 min under 7 GPa pressure condition. To investigate the microstructure evolution and physical property change of the HPHT sintered MgO samples, we employed a scanning electron microscopy (SEM), density and Vickers hardness measurements. The SEM results showed that the grain size of the sintered MgO increased from 200 nm to 1.9 μm as the sintering temperature increased. The density results showed that the sintered MgO achieved a more than 95% of the theoretical density in overall sintering temperature range. Based on Vickers hardness test, we confirmed that hardness increased as temperature increased. Our results implied that we might obtain the dense sintered MgO samples with an extremely short time and low temperature HPHT process compared to conventional electrical furnace sintering process.