Iron and Steel Division - Reduction of Undoped and Chromium-Doped Wüstite in Carbon Monoxide-Carbon Dioxide Mixtures

Integrated forms of two solutions of Fick's second law for the movement of a plane interface through a sample of wustite, and for diffusion into a semi-infinite slab of wustite, are shown to yield nearly identical values of the chemical diffusion coeffcients of cation vacancies in wustite, over the temperature range 900° to 1100°C. The chemical diffusion coefficients, the values of D obtained for the propagation of a concentration gradient through samples of undoped and doped wustite, are obtained from the equations It is becoming increasingly important in metallurgical practices to understand the role of the chemical diffusion coefficient, i.e., the diffusion coefficient of a species across a concentration gradient. During the first stages of sintering, one of the mechanisms by which the bonds between neighboring particles develop is by volume or bulk diffusion. This diffusion coefficient as deter- where ?m is the weight change at any time t, ?W is the total weight change at t =8, A is the area of the specimen, and AC is the total change in the cation concentration after the establishment of equilibrium, as determined by reduction experiments in different carbon monoxide -carbon dioxide mixtures within the limits of existence of the single-phase field. mined from the standard equations for volume diffusion during sintering is actually a chemical diffusion coefficient, and it has been observed to be many times larger than the self-diffusion coefficient as determined on the same materials by experiments using radioactive tracer techniques. Kuczyn-ski1 has noted that, if the controlling mechanism of sintering of A12O3 in an oxidizing atmosphere is the diffusion of oxygen, then this diffusion coefficient as measured from sintering rates is about 2.2 x 104 higher than the self-diffusion measurements obtained by tracer techniques. He has also reported the diffusion coefficient obtained from the rate of sintering of Fe2O3 powder to be about 10 6 times faster than the self-diffusion coefficient of