Commercially Viable Manufacturing of High Entropy Carbide Feedstocks

High-entropy materials have attracted considerable research interest owing to the significant increase in potential compositions and the unique combinations of properties in many of the known systems. High-entropy carbides (HECs) are one such subclass of high-entropy materials where numerable interesting material compositions have been identified. However, significant barriers exist toward the scale-up of HEC fabrication beyond the pilot research and development scale. Currently, all reported fabrications of HEC materials uses processes that are not amenable to manufacturing HECs on the scale a materials supply company requires. For example, the most commonly reported synthesis routes require high energy ball milling to reduce the diffusion lengths before producing a bulk HEC article. Herein, two commercially viable routes to producing HEC feedstocks are demonstrated. The first method, cold crucible induction melting (CCIM), is a direct route to synthesize a nearly homogeneous HEC bar that can be milled into a granular powder. The second method, spray drying, produces agglomerated spherical particles that can undergo further homogenization or be used directly. The consolidation of the as-spray dried HEC feedstock into a bulk HEC article is demonstrated using spark plasma sintering (SPS). Chemistry mapping coupled with several additional analyses of the cold crucible bar, spray dried particles, and SPS densified sample are utilized to verify the products of each processing route. The future manufacturing and high-throughput screening of other high entropy ceramic materials, such as oxides, nitrides, and borides, is expected to benefit from this demonstration of rapid and commercially relevant HEC feedstock production methods.