Tailored Residual Stresses in High Reliability Alumina-Mullite Ceramic Laminates

A design and processing approach to fabricate ceramic laminates with high mechanical reliability, i.e., high failure resistance, limited strength scatter, and increased damage tolerance is presented in this paper. Different ceramic layers are stacked together to develop a specific residual stress profile after sintering. By changing the composition of the laminae and the composite architecture it is possible to produce a material with predefined failure stress which can be evaluated from the fracture toughness curve correlated to the residual stresses. In addition, by tailoring the fracture toughness curve, surface defects can be forced to grow in a stable way before reaching the critical condition, thus obtaining a unique-value strength ceramic material. Laminates composed of alumina/mullite composite layers are designed and created in this work by the implementation of the proposed approach. The material obtained shows a "constant" strength of 456 MPa (standard deviation <7%) even when large surface damage is produced by Vickers indentation.