Sintering of vanadium-doped magnesium oxide

This work presents sintering experiments of MgO doped with 0.025 to 2 cat% vanadium. Low levels of dopant were chosen to avoid the formation of a network of secondary phases in the final microstructure. Dense MgO ceramics (99.5%) were obtained with only 0.05 cat% vanadium, added as magnesium-vanadate to the MgO-powder, at sintering temperatures as low as 1250 °C.