Anisotropic Thermal Expansion of Zirconium Diboride: An Energy-Dispersive X-Ray Diffraction Study

Abstract

Zirconium diboride (ZrB2) is an attractive material due to its thermal and electrical properties. In recent years, ZrB2 has been investigated as a superior replacement for sapphire when used as a substrate for gallium nitride devices. Like sapphire, ZrB2 has an anisotropic hexagonal structure which defines its directionally dependent properties. However, the anisotropic behavior of ZrB2 is not well understood. In this paper, we use energy-dispersive synchrotron X-ray diffraction to measure the thermal expansion of polycrystalline ZrB2 powder from 300 to 1150 K. Nine Bragg reflections are fit using Pseudo-Voigt peak profiles and used to compute the and lattice parameters using a nonlinear least-squares approximation. The temperature-dependent instantaneous thermal expansion coefficients are determined for each -axis and -axis direction and are described by the following equations: = (