TaC Coated Crucibles

Semicorex TaC Coated Crucibles are high-performance consumables. At the heart of the crucible lies a durable graphite or refractory substrate, which provides structural strength with excellent thermal conductivity. This stable foundation allows the crucible to react quickly to heating and cooling cycles while maintaining dimensional stability. To enhance performance, it is coated with a dense, uniform layer of tantalum carbide (TaC). TaC is recognized for its extreme hardness, chemical inertness, and capacity to withstand extreme thermal environments and creates an unparalleled barrier to wear, corrosion and contamination.

The TaC coating by the supercritical method. This method is a solid-liquid-gas three-phase transformation, which ensures density and bonding while increasing the coating thickness. The gas phase method is used as the base layer to ensure bonding and density, and then the liquid phase method is used to make it thicker. However, this layer will have some small holes, and then the small holes are filled with solid phase to ensure that it is thick enough and dense enough.

In metals melting applications, the TaC Coated Crucibles provide superior performance to reactive molten metals and aggressive slags. Metals like titanium, nickel, and high purity alloys often complicate trace and impurity removal at high temperatures due to their reactivity. Conventional crucibles can erode, react and release impurities into the melt contaminating the metallic melt bath. The TaC coated crucible provides a chemically inert barrier preventing contact between the molten metal and crucible substrate preventing contamination and providing a pure melt side reaction. In addition, TaC is extremely thermally conductive, allowing efficient heat transfer and thermodynamic kinetics resulting in faster melting cycles and enhanced energy efficiency. Lastly, the hardness of TaC will also protect it from erosion due to flowing heavy turbulent molten metal extending service life.

In addition to their application in the metallurgical processing applications, TaC-coated crucibles also find application in the semiconductor industry for their high-purity process capabilities. High purity of the TaC coating leads to substantially diminished particle and metal ion contamination of the semiconductor materials. TaC also maintains stability under the extreme temperature and chemical environments associated with semiconductors.

Thermal stability is an important characteristic of TaC coated crucibles. Given that tantalum carbide has an exceptionally high melting point of over 3800°C, TaC coated crucibles can tolerate very high temperatures without deteriorating performance. TaC-coated crucibles readily outperform most other coatings or materials in an extreme temperature environment. Furthermore, TaC exhibits high thermal conductivity, ensuring that consistent temperature is maintained across the crucible, in turn reducing hot spots and supporting stable melting and processing conditions. Stability contributes to the suitability of this product for metal refining or semiconductor manufacturing.

The crucibles can be made in a variety of shapes and sizes, with specific substrate and coating thickness tailored for your application. Be it a very large industry scale metal melting process, or semiconductors that require precision processing, the crucibles can satisfy operational requirements of your application.