What Are The Applications Of Silicon Carbide?

The main applications of silicon carbide are divided into three parts: abrasives, refractory materials, and casting and smelting to replace ferrosilicon. It can be said that these three uses account for 90% of silicon carbide. Secondly, there are major applications such as use in the semiconductor industry and applications in the photovoltaic industry.

The following are the main applications of silicon carbide:

1. Abrasives

As an abrasive, silicon carbide can cut very quickly due to its extremely high hardness. It can also be used to clean or etch hard surfaces of workpieces, which is not possible with soft abrasives. Because silicon carbide has high hardness, chemical stability, and certain strength, it can be used to produce bonded abrasives, coated abrasives, and free grinding for the processing of glass, ceramics, stone, cast iron, and some non-ferrous metals, cemented carbide, titanium alloy, grinding wheels, etc.2

. Refractory Materials

Because silicon carbide has a high melting point, chemical inertness, and resistance to thermal shock, it can be used for grinding, plates and saggers used in ceramic furnaces, silicon carbide bricks used in vertical cylindrical distillation furnaces in the zinc smelting industry, lining aluminum electrolytic cells, crucibles, small furnace materials, and other ceramic silicon carbide products. Silicon carbide refractory materials have high strength, high thermal conductivity, good impact resistance, oxidation resistance, wear resistance, erosion resistance and other excellent high-temperature properties, and are high-quality refractory material.

3. Foundry Industry

Silicon carbide is crucial in the foundry industry. Silicon carbide for casting can effectively improve the metallurgical quality of molten iron, thereby reducing the above problems. At present, the price of ferrosilicon in the market has increased dramatically, and the price of silicon carbide has not changed much. In addition, the aluminum content of ferrosilicon is higher than that of silicon carbide, so it is also better to use silicon carbide instead of ferrosilicon. Using silicon carbide (typically low-quality silicon carbide) instead of deoxidizing ferrosilicon can also save a lot of resources for businesses.

4. Semiconductor field

One-dimensional SiC nanomaterials have unique excellent properties and wider application prospects due to their microscopic morphology and crystal structure. They are considered an important component of third-generation high-bandwidth semiconductor materials. Third-generation semiconductor materials are high-bandwidth semiconductor materials, also known as high-temperature semiconductor materials, mainly including silicon carbide, gallium nitride, aluminum nitride, zinc oxide, diamond, etc.