Abstract:
Whisker is able to enhance remarkably the hardness of ceramics while strengthening their strength and toughness, and has outstanding advantages in solving the lack of hardness. Aiming at the problems of high blindness of component design and time-consuming of specimen preparation in the current experimental method to investigate whisker-reinforced ceramics, a bidirectional stochastic modeling method to calculate the whisker Poisson’s ratio was proposed taking β-Si
3N
4w-reinforced Si
3N
4 ceramic as the object. Based on the plane super-soft pseudopotential method under the framework of density functional theory (DFT) and Perdew-Wang 91 (PW-91) function in the generalized gradient approximation (GGA), the β-Si
3N
4 supercell Poisson’s ratio was calculated. Further, an approach to establish the two-dimensional microstructure of β-Si
3N
4w-reinforced Si
3N
4 ceramics was presented by using Delaunay triangulation rule and pseudo-random function method. Then, the model hardness was predicted and the hardening mechanism of β-Si
3N
4w was discussed. Results show that the Poisson’s ratio of β-Si
3N
4w is about 0.27. The predicted hardness values of β-Si
3N
4w-reinforced Si
3N
4 ceramics are in good consistent with the related experimental test values, which demonstrates the validity of whisker Poisson’s ratio calculation model and whisker-reinforced ceramic microstructure modeling method. The hardness of Si
3N
4-based ceramics reaches the maximum value of 22.80 GPa at 3wt% β-Si
3N
4w content. Stress analysis shows that the anisotropic distribution of β-Si
3N
4w disperses the stress concentration area and with stands a large amount of stress depending on its high strength characteristics, which is the main reason for the increase in hardness.