Improvement of Mechanical Properties and Wall Thickness Uniformity of Hollow Ceramic Spheres by Biaxial Rotation Slurry Injection Technology

Abstract

Ceramic hollow spheres have great potential for deep-sea applications. However, the irregularity of the conventional molding process, among other reasons, results in low wall thickness uniformity of hollow spheres. To solve this problem, in this work, we developed a biaxial rotation grouting process for deep-sea ceramic hollow buoyancy spheres, which improves the drawbacks of the traditional rotary grouting method that results in poor wall thickness uniformity of the hollow spheres due to its irregular rotational processing. In this paper, an experimental study was carried out to investigate the effects of different rotational methods, rotational speeds, rotational time, solid phase content, etc. on the wall thickness uniformity of ceramic hollow spheres. The results show that the hollow floating balls prepared by the biaxial rotation method have the lowest wall thickness standard deviation (0.04) when the rotation speed is 60 rpm, the molding time is 8 min, and the solid phase content is 70 wt%. After the hydrostatic pressure test of 120 MPa, the hydrostatic compressive strength of hollow spheres prepared by the biaxial rotation method was increased by 31.67% compared with that of the traditional process.

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Wuhan University of Technology and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, Part of Springer Nature