Superhard materials are used in a wide range of applications from wear-resistant coatings to high-speed cutting tools. Although materials with a a hardness of > 40 GPa are considered superhard, materials possessing a hardness much greater than this number are always very favourable in order to increase the lifetime of heavy-duty tools. Hard borides such as OsB2, RuB2 and ReB2 have proven to be reliable candidates for applications where extreme hardness is required. To address the cost issues with these compounds, however, we have recently explored the interesting properties of tungsten tetraboride (WB4), as an inexpensive superhard material with a Vickers microindentation hardness of ~43 GPa (optically measured) under an applied load of 0.49 N. In an attempt to make even harder materials at low cost, we have synthesized and characterized solid solutions of WB4 with some transition metals and have shown we can increase the hardness by 20%.

Superhard solid solutions based on tungsten tetraboride

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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