Effect of the High Energy Milling in the Crystallite Size of WC-Co

Abstract

High-energy milling has been used for production of nano-structured WC-Co powders. During the High-Energy Milling, the powders suffer severe high-energy impacts in the process of ball-to-ball and ball-to-vial wall collisions of the grinding media. Hard metal produced from nanostructured powders have better mechanical properties after appropriate sintering process. During the milling the particles size of WC and Co can be reduced and plastic deformed. In the present work, a mixture of WC-10%Co was produced by high energy milling. The starting powders of the WC (0.87 μm - Wolfran Bergau) and Co (0.93 μm - H.C.Starck) were used to produce the hard metal. The influence of the milling time on the particle size distributions and in the lattice strain was investigated. Milling time of the 2, 10, 20, 50, 70, 100 and 150 hours were used. The powders after milling were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Scanning Electronic Microscopy (SEM). The results show that 10 h milling were enough to reduce the crystallite size of WC and the increase of the milling time reduces the crystallite size.