Engineering Commons^™

Electric Field Effects On Grain Boundary Formation And Grain Growth, Klaus Van Benthem, Hasti Majidi, Jorgen Rufner, Wei Qin

Electric Field Assisted Sintering and Related Phenomena Far From Equilibrium

The application of electric fields can enable the accelerated consolidation of materials during field assisted sintering, such as spark plasma sintering or flash sintering. Although such techniques are already employed for the synthesis of a wide variety of microstructures with unique macroscopic properties, a fundamental understanding of the atomic-scale mechanisms for grain boundary formation and subsequent migration in the presence of electrostatic potentials is mostly absent from the literature. We have designed experiments to specifically de-couple the effects of heating and applied electrostatic fields during consolidation. In situ transmission electron microscopy studies were carried out with new sample holder designs …