titanium aluminum carbide (Ti3AlC2) is an exciting new ternary-layered material. It combines the excellent electrical and thermal conductivity of metals with high elastic modulus similar to ceramics, which makes it suitable for use in a variety of applications.
It is widely used for Max special ceramics, electronic materials, high-temperature structural materials, electrode brush materials and chemical anti-corrosion materials [6,8,9]. Especially, Ti3AlC2 has been applied to MXene (Ti3C2Tx) precursors for fabrication of MXene supercapacitors.
Pressureless sintering of phase-pure Ti2AlC powder was successfully achieved by heating a mixture of Al:Ti:TiC (molar ratio of 1:1:0.75) powders at 1300 degC for 4 h in Ar, and then the sample was sintered under the same conditions for 2 h in a pressureless condition. The relative density of the sintered Ti2AlC powders reached 94.2% without sintering additives and 96.0% with sintering additives of 5 mass% Al2O3, Y2O3, MgO, CaO and TiO2. The hardness of the Ti2AlC samples increased with the addition of the sintering additives. The Vickers hardness of the samples increased from 3.5 to 5.8 GPa with the increase of the sintering additives, but the flexural strength decreased with the increase of the additives. In addition, the fracture toughness of the samples increased with the increase of the sintering additives, but it decreased with the increase of the size of the sintering additives. Moreover, the addition of Al2O3 improved the tensile strength of the samples.
