Room temperature stability, structure and mechanical properties of cubic tungsten carbide in flash sintered products

This work explores the possibility to obtain the metastable cubic tungsten carbide phase (WC 1-x ) during the rapid and the ultrarapid consolidation of hexagonal WC nanopowders. Spark plasma sintering and flash sintering techniques are implemented to study the formation and the stability of WC 1-x during sintering. A biphasic ceramic material, corresponding to cubic-WC/hex-WC (10/90 vol