Dear Colleagues,

Cemented carbides and cermets are indispensable classes of composite materials, which are used in a variety of high-technology applications. Their field reaches from coarse-grained grades for structural parts, mining and road construction, over medium-sized and fine-grained grades for metal cutting (turning, milling and drilling), to ultra-fine grades for PCB drilling and woodcutting. Additionally, a variety of other applications were established, such as for wire drawing, sawing and chip bonding. To end up with high-quality cemented carbide products already high-quality hard-phase powders, such as WC and Ti(C,N), tailored to a special composition, grain size and grain-size distribution, are a necessary prerequisite, together with modern production techniques for parts by liquid-phase sintering.

In this Special Issue, which comes close to the time of the 90-years anniversary of production of cemented carbides (hardmetal), an overview of the most important achievements of research, development and production on cemented carbides and cermets should be given together with a strong focus on modern trends, covering also alternative hard metal binders, hard phases and techniques to improve the performance of this class of materials.

It is my pleasure to invite you to submit a manuscript for this Special Issue, for which full papers, reviews and communications are highly appreciated.

Prof. Dr. Walter Lengauer
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• Hard-phase powders
• Binder phase
• Sintering
• Cermets
• Production
• Application