TY - Journal Article AU - Vicario, Iban AU - Poulon-Quintin, Angeline AU - Lagos, M.A. AU - Silvain, JF TI - Effect of Material and Process Atmosphere in the Preparation of Al-Ti-B Grain Refiner by SHS PY - 2015 PB - MDPI AG, POSTFACH, CH-4005 BASEL, SWITZERLAND AB - Al-Ti-B master alloys are widely used in the aluminum industry as grain refiners for the control of the microstructure of the aluminum alloys. The SHS (self-propagating high-temperature synthesis) is an ex situ method that uses exothermic reactions to sustain the chemical reaction in a combustion wave. The advantages of SHS are the low energy requirement, simplicity and product purity. However, the raw material used has to be very pure, with a very small size leading to the necessity of a reactor with a protective gas to produce the reaction. The purpose of this investigation is to fabricate SHS master alloys with commercial standard raw materials, with lower purity and higher grain size without a reactor or protective gas in order to (1) decrease the price and (2) improve the productivity of master alloy manufacturing. The possibility of using cheap borated salts instead of expensive pure boron has been studied. Different compositions of aluminum master alloy have been developed. Bigger TiB2 grain size has been obtained when using bigger commercial raw materials. Larger titanium powder can produce an aluminum master alloy with a maximum of 30% of aluminum without reactor. In comparison, SHS reaction is much more difficult when using finer titanium powder. SN - 2075-4701 UR - http://hdl.handle.net/11556/248 DX - doi:10.3390/met5031387 ER -