HREM Observations of Kinking in SiC Induced by Ball Milling

Kinking in SiC during ball milling (BM) at room temperature has been reported in this article. High-resolution electron microscopy (HREM) has been employed to characterize the microstructure at the atomic level. HREM observations show that partial dislocations can be introduced into SiC and glide on the primary (0001) planes under BM at room temperature. When numbers of the gliding partials are piled up along one direction, a kink boundary forms, which will initiate a crack. However, when gliding partials are not piled up, glide of the partials changes the stacking sequence and transformation from 6H-SiC→3C-SiC occurs.