Synthesis and thermal expansion of ZrO2/ZrW2O8 composites

In this work, a ceramic composite of ZrW2O8 and ZrO2 was synthesized, in order to investigate the possibility of compensating the positive thermal expansion of ZrO2 with the negative thermal expansion (NTE) compound ZrW2O8, tailoring the thermal expansion of these composites. The NTE material was mixed with varying amounts of ZrO2. The thermal expansion coefficients of this series of composites decrease with increasing amounts of ZrW2O8. Nevertheless, a negative deviation from the values expected by the rule of mixtures was found to be most pronounced in the middle of the compositional region.