Use of mechanical alloying and subsequent annealing for obtaining intermetallic compound CuAl 2

The possibility of obtaining a “line” (narrow-homogeneity-range) intermetallic compound CuAl 2 with the use of mechanical alloying (MA) and subsequent annealing has been investigated by X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy. Regimes (composition of a charge mixture, time of preliminary MA, time and temperature of annealing) allowing one to obtain a virtually single-phase compound have been determined. The low-temperature annealings in a temperature range of 100–250°C have shown that the most probable mechanism of mass transfer upon heating of layered composites obtained by MA is grain-boundary diffusion, which can be explained by a large fraction of grain boundaries in mechanically alloyed powders.