What are cermets?

Ceramic plus metal = cermet. It's really that simple! Why would
you want to combine a metal and a ceramic? Metals, though
versatile, aren't capable of withstanding the incredibly high
temperatures you typically encounter in airplane jet engines or
space rockets. Ceramics are brilliant at high temperatures and
able to resist attack by chemicals and things like oxygen in the air,
but their sheer inertness means they're just pretty boring most of
the time. Brilliant for teapots and false teeth, but fairly hopeless
when it comes to doing interesting things like conducting
electricity or heat or bending and flexing. If you want something
that can survive in really tough environments and still behave in
interesting ways, you need to switch your attention to things like
alloys, compositesand cermets.

Artwork: Simplified cermet microstructure (the fine inner, structure you'll see if you
look at a cermet with a powerful microscope). In the type of cermet used in cutting
tools, the core (gray) might be made of a ceramic such as tungsten carbide, while
the binder (black stipples) could be made of a nickel alloy. The scale shown in red is
approximately 20m (20 microns). Most modern cermets designed for tools have a
core material that's a carbide or nitride of titanium, tantalum, tungsten, niobium, or
molybdenum, and a binder of nickel or cobalt.
"Cermet" is a generic name for a whole range of different
composites. Sometimes the ceramic is the biggest ingredient and
acts as the matrix (effectively the base or binder) to which
particles of the metal are attached. Cermets used for electrical
applications are typically made this way (in other words, they are
examples of ceramic matrix composites or CMCs). But the metal
component (typically an element such as cobalt, molybdenum, or
nickel) can also be the matrix, giving what's called a metal matrix
composite (MMC), in which hard ceramic particles are held
together by a tough but ductile metal. Cermets used in things like
cutting tools are made this way.
Like other composites, cermets "work" by producing a material
with a microstructure that has certain things in common with each
of its different constituents. For example, the metal ingredient
effectively allows electrons to flow through the material, enabling
what would otherwise be a ceramic insulator to conduct electricity.
That suggests cermets are relatively stable structures in which the
metal and the ceramic are fixed in placebut that's not always
the case. Under some conditions, cermets behave as though they
have a dynamic surface layer, with metal particles constantly
detaching and reattaching themselves. This effectively forms a
smoother, harder, and more wear-resistant upper layer that
makes a metal behave more like a ceramic.

Artwork: How do cermets conduct electricity? Here's the structure of a typical cermet
made from particles of ceramic alumina (red), each of which is surrounded by
platinum metal (blue). Although electricity doesn't normally flow through a ceramic, it
can flow through a cermet (yellow arrowed line) by following a circuit through the
platinum. Artwork based on a drawing from US Patent 4,183,746: Cermets by
Stephen L. Pearce and Gordon L. Selman, Johnson, Matthey & Co., Limited,
courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.

What are cermets used for?

Electrical components are one obvious application. Because they
can get extremely hot, they need to behave like ceramics but,
since they also need to conduct electricity, it helps if they work
like metals. Cermets offer a perfect solution in components such
as resistors and vacuum tubes (valves). Crudely, we can think of
cermet resistors as a mixture of an insulator (the ceramic matrix)
and a conductor (the metal particles), with the type and relative
proportions of the two "ingredients" (ceramic and metal)
determining the ultimate resistance.

Artwork: An early design for a cermet-based electrical resistor from the 1950s. The
cermet (red, 10) is made from a nonconducting glass binder and conducting metal
particles, mounted on a ceramic, insulating base (blue, 11), and connected to a
circuit through two electrodes (green, 12/13). Artwork from US Patent 2,950,995:
Electrical resistance element by Thomas M. Place, Sr. and Thomas M. Place, Jr.,
courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.
Machine tools are another increasingly common use for cermets,
which offer greater toughness and wear resistance than more
traditional materials. Titanium carbide (TiC), from which many
cutting and drilling tools are made, is a popular choice of cermet
for tools used in milling, turning and boring, and for making
threads and grooves. Typically cermet tools are made from either
with titanium carbide alone or with both titanium carbide and
titanium nitride (TiN). Generally, cermets provide higher cutting-
tool speeds, better surface finish, and last much longer than
traditional tool parts. Unlike tools coated in carbide, cermet-
coated tools do not wear in the same way but effectively
regenerate themselves.

Photo: Cutting tools made from cermets last longer and produce a better surface
finish than traditional carbide tools. Photo by Eduardo Zaragoza courtesy of US
Navy.
The interesting surface properties of cermets also make them
useful for reducing friction in machine parts. Some companies sell
"ceramic metal conditioners" for engines that simultaneously
make metal surfaces both smoother and tougher, reducing friction
and wear at the same time, giving the dual benefits of greater fuel
economy and longer engine life. Products such as this provide
similar benefits to lubricants but work in an entirely different way
by effectively modifying the surface structure of metal machine
parts to make them behave more like ceramics. Since the
particles involved are atoms and molecules, what we have here is
a perfect example of nanotechnology in action.
Military applications of cermets include their use as lightweight
protective coatings on clothing and friction-reducing surface
layers on nuclear submarines.
What else will we use them for in future? Watch this space!

Who invented cermets?

Metallurgist Peter Schwarzkopf of Metallwerk Plansee GmbH in Austria developed the
first cermet around 1930. It was Titanit-S, with the chemical formula TiCMo2C
(Ni,Mo,Cr), a "hardmetal" made from titanium carbide and molybdenum designed for
cutting tools. Unfortunately, it proved too brittle for widespread commercial use and it
wasn't until the 1960s that titanium carbide cermets with a nickel/molybdenum binder
were introduced by the Ford Motor Company for use in machine tools [Jaworska et al,
2006].