Fabrication of transparent yttria by HIP and the glass-encapsulation method

This method consists of a combination of vacuum sintering at 1600 °C followed by hot isostatic pressing (HIP) at 1500 °C of a highly agglomerated commercial powder. The use of evacuated glass capsules to perform HIP treatment allowed samples that showed open porosity after vacuum sintering to be sintered to transparency. The sintering response of the investigated powder was studied by careful microstructural observations using scanning electron microscopy and optical microscopy both in reflection and transmission. The successful key of this method was to keep porosity intergranular during pre-sintering, so that it can be removed subsequently by HIP treatment. It was found that agglomerates of closely packed particles are helpful to reach that purpose, since they densify fully and leave only intergranular porosity. However, performing HIP treatment at 1625 °C was found to result in opaque samples. This was attributed to the diffusion of argon inside the capsule. Contamination at different steps of processing was also investigated by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS).