Institute of Metals Division - Properties of Chromium Boride and Sintered Chromium Boride - Discussion

J. WULFF*—It seems to me that the author could improve the quality of his high temperature material by using less nickel as a cementing agent in hot pressing. Furthermore, to avoid the presence of undilfused nickel which would not be oxidation resistant, permit me to suggest that he use a nickel-chromium powder containing a small percentage of boron. This would give him a liquid phase at a lower temperature and accelerate both sintering and homogenization. The commercial alloy known ascolrnonoy contains sufficient chromium to be heat resistant and sufficient boron to be of low melting point. Such an alloy may be applicable as a cementing agent in increasing the quality of Mr. Sindeband's alloys. Finally 1 believe the author unfair to himself in expecting a porous material to have properties equivalent to one of 100 pet density. S. J. SINDEBAND—Dr. Wulff's point is well taken. Early in the program we realized the fact that we were having difficulty with these low-melting alloys, and we had hoped, since the colmonoy alloys of which you speak are at the nickel-rich end of the diagram, that by going to the other end of the diagram (chromium boride-rich) we would not have this difficulty. Thus we tried to use very small percentages of binder; but for reasons which are not exactly apparent we found that when we did this it was necessary to raise the pressing temperature to a point which we were unable to attain. For all compositions which we tried using nickel, or for that matter any nickel iron or cobalt containing material as a binder, we found that we would get low melting boride phases, which as you point out are the commercial "strength" of the hard-facing materials. 1 personally believe these owe a great deal of their behavior and even hardness to the nickel boride which is considerable evidence when an alloy of chromium boride is made with nickel. Nickel boride itself is very hard. We did try pure chromium as a binder and found there was considerable difficulty in handling it, particularly since we could not just hot press under