Journal Article

Powder Metallurgy Produced Aligned Long Tungsten Fiber Reinforced Tungsten Composites

Tan, Xiaoyue, Coenen, Jan W., Riesch, Johann, Liu, Chao, Linsmeier, Christian, Broeckmann, Christoph, Terra, Alexis, Mao, Yiran, Wu, Yucheng, Höschen, Till

2022

Overview

For the future fusion reactor, tungsten is the main candidate material as the plasma-facing material. However, considering the high thermal stress during operation, the intrinsic brittleness of tungsten is one of the issues. To overcome the brittleness, tungsten fiber reinforces tungsten composites (Wf/W) developed using extrinsic toughening mechanisms. The powder metallurgy process and chemical vapor deposition process are the two production routes for preparing Wf/W. For the powder metallurgy route, due to technical limitations, previous studies focused on short random distributed fiber-reinforced composites. However, for short random fiber composites, the strength and reinforcement effect are considerably limited compared to aligned continuous fiber composites. In this work, aligned long tungsten fiber reinforced tungsten composites have been first time realized based on powder metallurgy processes, by alternately placing tungsten weaves and tungsten powder layers. The produced Wf/W shows significantly improved mechanical properties compared to pure W and conventional short fiber Wf/W.

• Publisher: MDPI AG
• Subject: aligned long fiber composites / Brittleness / Chemical vapor deposition / Continuous fiber composites / Crack propagation / Deformation / Ductility / field asisted sintering technology / Fusion reactors / Materials selection / Mechanical properties / Metallurgical analysis / Powder metallurgy / pseudo-ductility / Random fiber composites / Short fibers / Sintering / Thermal stress / Tungsten / tungsten fiber reinforced tungsten