Thermal Shock Testing Ceramics

Practical experience has shown that thermal shock tests do not lead to generally useful test data.

Thermal shock testing ceramics.

Ceramic is hard and resistant to abrasion but it is brittle and propagates cracks readily. Thin circular disks are heated up to 1750 k with a tungsten halogen lamp yielding heating rates up to 1200 k s. The thermal shock and thermal fatigue behaviour of ceramic materials has been determined with a new type of testing system 3. The thermal shock of ceramic materials is influenced by many factors such as strength young s modulus fracture toughness thermal conductivity and thermal expansion coefficient.

The transition between temperature extremes occurs very rapidly greater than 15 c per minute. This is probably due to the fact that thermal shock failure is a complicated function of the external thermal shock conditions and of the temperature functions of five different material properties.