Recent development in reactive synthesis of nanostructured bulk materials by spark plasma sintering

As a relatively novel sintering technique, spark plasma sintering (SPS) has been used extensively over the past decade to prepare a wide variety of materials, e.g., ceramics, composites, cermets, metals and alloys. Many applications of the SPS technique are the fabrication of nanostructured materials using nanosize powdered precursors as starting materials. This article provides a review of research activities that concentrate on the development of the SPS reaction sintering (SPS-RS) to produce dense nanostructured materials, which indicate that it is possible to synthesize and compact dense bulk materials with controlled sub-micron or even nanoscale grain sizes by the use of the SPS technique.