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Where is silicon carbide mainly used?

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2023-11-14

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Silicon carbide is an artificial abrasive material classified as an inorganic compound. It comes in two varieties: black silicon carbide and green silicon carbide. Silicon carbide boasts stable chemical properties, a high thermal conductivity, a low coefficient of thermal expansion, and excellent wear resistance. So, where is silicon carbide primarily used? Today, we’ll introduce its main applications.
 
　　Silicon carbide is produced by high‑temperature smelting in an electric resistance furnace, using raw materials such as quartz sand, petroleum coke (or coal coke), and wood chips (with the addition of common salt when producing green silicon carbide).
 
　　Where is silicon carbide mainly used?
 
　　1. Abrasives and Grinding Tools: As an abrasive, silicon carbide, owing to its exceptionally high hardness, enables extremely rapid cutting and can also be used to clean or etch the surfaces of relatively hard workpieces.
 
　　2. Refractory materials: Due to its high melting point, chemical inertness, and excellent thermal shock resistance, silicon carbide is used in a variety of refractory products, including support plates and saggers for kilns used in the firing of ceramic goods, silicon carbide bricks for vertical distillation retorts in the zinc‑smelting industry, linings for aluminum electrolytic cells, crucibles, and small furnace components.
 
　　3. Foundry Industry: Silicon carbide plays a crucial role in the foundry sector; silicon carbide used in casting can effectively enhance the metallurgical quality of molten iron, thereby mitigating the aforementioned issues.
 
　　4. Semiconductor field: One-dimensional silicon carbide nanomaterials, owing to their unique microstructure and crystallographic features, exhibit a range of distinctive superior properties and hold great promise for a wide array of applications, and are widely regarded as potential key building blocks of third-generation wide-bandgap semiconductor materials.
 
　　5. Photovoltaic Sector: Photovoltaic inverters play a crucial role in photovoltaic power generation, not only performing DC–AC conversion but also maximizing the performance of solar cells and providing system fault protection.

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