Tungsten Carbide Copper Alloy

Tungsten carbide copper alloy is one of numerous metal alloys sold by American Elements under the trade name AE Alloys™. Generally immediately available in most volumes, AE Alloys™ are available as bar, Ingot, ribbon, wire, shot, sheet, and foil. Ultra high purity and high purity forms also include metal powder, submicron powder and nonsocial, targets for thin film deposition, and pellets for chemical vapor deposition and physical vapor deposition applications. American Elements produces too many standard grades when applicable, including Mil Spec; ACS, Reagent and Technical Grade; Food, Agricultural and Pharmaceutical Grade; Optical Grade, USP and EP/BP and follows applicable ASTM testing standards. Typical and custom packaging is available. Primary applications include bearing assembly, ballast, casting, step soldering, and radiation shielding.

Fine-grained tungsten carbide copper alloy cemented carbide was sintered via spark plasma sintering at 1773K using a fine tungsten carbide powder with a mean particle size of 0.11 mm. The mechanical properties were compared with tungsten carbide copper alloy cemented carbide and a binder less tungsten carbide-sintered material. The Vickers hardness and fracture toughness obtained by the indentation fracture method for WC-10 mass% Cu cemented carbide were 1600 and 0 MPam0:5, respectively, which were in no way inferior to the values for tungsten carbide copper alloy cemented carbide. Increasing the amount of copper improved the toughness and degraded the hardness. Tungsten carbide copper alloy cemented carbide exhibited much higher creep resistance than tungsten carbide alloy cemented carbide, and was the same as the binder less WC-sintered body up to 1273 K. In this study, we selected copper as the binder for WC since it is the next transition metal to iron, nickel and cobalt in the periodic table. Copper offers superior ductility and does not react with carbon to form any carbide at elevated temperatures. Use of copper as a binder is expected to improve the toughness of WC and result in an increase in strength at room temperature. In addition, both carbon and tungsten have very low solubility in liquid copper. Although this makes copper a poor sintering additive, this effect inhibits the degradation of the creep resistance. Until now, there have been no reports on the fabrication or mechanical properties of dense tungsten carbide copper alloy cemented carbide due to the difficulty of densification of this material.