Silicon Nitride Sintering Furnace Application In Bearings/High-Temperature Material/Medical

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Application in various industries

Bearings

Silicon nitride bearings are both full ceramic bearings and ceramic hybrid bearings with balls in ceramics and races in steel. Silicon nitride ceramics have good shock resistance compared to other ceramics. Therefore, ball bearings made of silicon nitride ceramic are used in performance bearings. A representative example is use of silicon nitride bearings in the main engines of the NASA's Space Shuttle

High-temperature material

Silicon nitride has long been used in high-temperature applications. In particular, it was identified as one of the few monolithic ceramic materials capable of surviving the severe thermal shock and thermal gradients generated in hydrogen/oxygen rocket engines. To demonstrate this capability in a complex configuration, NASA scientists used advanced rapid prototyping technology to fabricate a one-inch-diameter, single-piece combustion chamber/nozzle (thruster) component. The thruster was hot-fire tested with hydrogen/oxygen propellant and survived five cycles including a 5-minute cycle to a 1320 °C material temperature.

Medical

Silicon nitride has many orthopedic applications.The material is also an alternative to PEEK (polyether ether ketone) and titanium, which are used for spinal fusion devices. It is silicon nitride's hydrophilic, microtextured surface that contributes to the material's strength, durability and reliability compared to PEEK and titanium. Certain compositions of this material exhibit anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, or anti-viral properties

Metal working and cutting tools

The first major application of Si3N4 was abrasive and cutting tools. Bulk, monolithic silicon nitride is used as a material for cutting tools, due to its hardness, thermal stability, and resistance to wear. It is especially recommended for high speed machining of cast iron. Hot hardness, fracture toughness and thermal shock resistance mean that sintered silicon nitride can cut cast iron, hard steel and nickel based alloys with surface speeds up to 25 times quicker than those obtained with conventional materials such as tungsten carbide. The use of Si3N4 cutting tools has had a dramatic effect on manufacturing output. For example, face milling of gray cast iron with silicon nitride inserts doubled the cutting speed, increased tool life from one part to six parts per edge, and reduced the average cost of inserts by 50%, as compared to traditional tungsten carbide tools.

Electronics

Silicon nitride is often used as an insulator and chemical barrier in manufacturing integrated circuits, to electrically isolate different structures or as an etch mask in bulk micromachining. As a passivation layer for microchips, it is superior to silicon dioxide, as it is a significantly better diffusion barrier against water molecules and sodium ions, two major sources of corrosion and instability in microelectronics. It is also used as a dielectric between polysilicon layers in capacitors in analog chips.

Si3N4 cantilever used in atomic force microscopes

(via WIKIPEDIA)

       Zhuzhou Ruideer Intelligent Equipment Co., Ltd. is a manufacturer of powder metallurgy solutions for the whole industry chain. It integrates process development, production, sales and coating services of sintering furnace, PVD coating furnace and CVD coating furnace. Ruideer has standardized workshops and office buildings, covering an area of more than 19,000 square meters, with more than 170 employees. Ruideer’s productivity reaches 120 sets of pressurized sintering furnaces per year, 500,000 pieces of PVD coating per month, and 250,000 pieces of CVD coating per month.

In the past years, Ruideer has been rated as a national high-tech enterprise, a national-level Specialized and Sophisticated enterprise (appointed as a national key little giant enterprise in 2022), a little giant enterprise in Hunan Province, and a single champion of pressure sintering furnace in Hunan Province, and gained 85 intellectual property authorizations.

Nearly 400 sets of degreasing gas pressure sintering furnaces and 180 sets of degreasing vacuum pressure sintering furnaces have been produced. In order to continuously meet and exceed customer needs, Ruideer provides customers with "targeted application, key development, and tailor-made" characteristic services. The products are sold both at home and abroad (US, Russia, EU, Japan, Ukraine, South Korea, Vietnam and other countries), providing 24-hour response services to domestic customers. Ruideer's products have been widely used in the cemented carbide, ceramic, MIM stainless steel, semiconductor industry.

In line with the enterprise spirit of "quality-oriented, continuous innovation, service satisfaction, unity and hard work, and common development", Ruideer is guided by market demand and business development, supported by key technologies, closely following customer needs, and is committed to serving customers with stable and reliable technical products and contribute to the application in the field of powder metallurgy!

Our standard sintering furnace model include (but are not limited to):

• Gas pressure sinteing integrated furnace（1MPa/2MPa/6MPa/10MPa)
• Debinding vacuum sintering integrated furnace
• MIM stainless steel sintering furnace
• Silicon nitride sintering furnace
• Silicon carbide sintering furnace
• Metal sintering furnace (Mo/W heater)
• Vacuum brazing furnace
• CVD coating furnace