Reactive Melt Infiltration of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Ceramic Composites for Ultra-High Temperature Applications

Introduction

Ultra-high temperature ceramics (UHTCs) are the most promising materials that could be used in oxidizing environments at temperatures over 2000°C. The most widely studied UHTCs are refractory borides and carbides, such as ZrB₂, HfB₂, ZrC, HfC, TaC and TiC. These materials have been considered to have a great potential to use in thermal protection systems and propulsion systems for hypersonic flight vehicles or reentry vehicles, owing to their unique properties (shown in Table 1 [Justin et al., 2011]) of high melting point, high hardness and excellent corrosion resistance (Tripp et al., 1973; Hinze et al., 1975; Han et al., 2008). A number of government facilities, as well as universities, have devoted to the research of UHTCs. HfC, ZrC, ZrB₂ and HfB₂ are the mostly studied UHTCs, which are considered to be potential candidate for sharp leading edge and some other high temperature ablation-resistant components (Kolodziej et al., 1997). During the past years, numerous of work has been focused on the material design (Monteverde et al., 2002; Opeka et al., 2004), densification (Zhang et al., 2002; Qu et al., 2008) and property evaluation of these materials (Levine et al., 2002) and great achievements have been received.