Spark plasma sintering is a promising technology particularly on the sintering of covalently bonded boride based ceramics. In the present study, effects of sintering temperature, sintering pressure and pressure application mode were tried to be determined for the spark plasma sintering of monolithic TiB2 ceramics. The hardest compact (17.46 GPa) was obtained in the experiment which was conducted at 1780 degrees C under a pressure of 50 MPa (applied when die reached to 1500 degrees C). The relative density value of the sample was achieved as 79.44%. X-Ray diffraction spectrometry, scanning electron microscopy, Vickers micro hardness and Archimedes density measurement techniques were mainly used for the characterization.

Keywords: Titanium diboride; Spark plasma sintering