M Khodaei - Department of Materials Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, ۸۴۱۵۶-۸۳۱۱۱, Iran
M.H. Enayti
F Karimzadeh

High energy ball milling has been recognized as an effective way of producing nanocrystalline, amorphous, and other non-equilibrium structures mainly through a solid state reaction. An important characteristic of such phases is that they exhibit properties and performance much improved over their conventional course-grained counterparts. Chemical reactions induced by mechanical treatment, i.e. mechanochemical synthesis, are known to be very effective for preparing nanocomposite powders with more than two phases [1]. Fabrication of iron aluminides-alumina cermets was done by presureless sintering of iron aluminides and alumina powder mixture [2], and it was revealed that addition of alumina particles to the iron aluminides lead to poor interfacial bonding between two phases. Furthermore, hot pressing of iron aluminides with Al2O3 nanopowder [3] also resulted in sever agglomeration of alumina phase during sintering. According to the literature, the in-situ formation of two phases in a composite structure could overcome the incompatibility of iron aluminides and alumina phases. In this study, Fe3Al-Al2O3 nanocomposite powder was synthesized by mechanochemical reaction of Fe2O3 and Al powder mixtures. Details of processing steps, phase transformation, microstructural characterization, and sintering behavior are investigated