Combustion Synthesis of Nitrogen Ceramics and Nanosized Ceramic Powders

The nitriding combustion synthesis of nitrogen ceramics has long been an important research area and has found many industrial applications in regarding to the synthesis of a wide range of nitride powders in the past two decades. The energy saving and especially time-saving feature makes the infiltration combustion synthesis technique very attractive in the cost effective fabrication of nitride ceramics. That is why there are continuous efforts devoted to the understanding of the reaction mechanism as well as to the optimizing of the processing parameters on the synthesis of nitride ceramics. In this chapter, the progress on the combustion synthesis of nitride ceramic powders was summarized. It was found that the remarkable achievements obtained in this area could be classified as two aspects. The first aspect is the development of up-scalable cost-effective fabrication process, which follows a direction of decreasing the synthesis pressure, that is, the minimum nitrogen pressure required for implementing the combustion synthesis of nitride ceramics has been decreased from high pressure to normal pressure, and up to now, the nitride ceramic powders could even be synthesized in air. The other aspect is the development of high performance nano-sized nitride powders by combustion synthesis method which showed integrated functional and structural properties. For instance, the Re-doped SiAlON powders could be used as new phosphors for LED lighting and the nano and/or sub-micrometer sized α/β-SiAlON could be densified directly without using any sintering additives. Finally, the regularities for the large-scale synthesis of nitride powders were discussed, and the properties of the as-synthesized nitride powders were systematically characterized.