Exothermics is focused primarily on development and commercialization of cost-effective, non-oxide ceramics, refractory metals and specialty thin film technologies for end use in aerospace/defense, semicon and other niche markets. Exothermics has gained valuable expertise in producing many types of specialty metals, refractory compounds and nonoxide ceramics from ongoing involvement with an array of defense, industrial and high temperature materials development programs and manufacturing efforts. Most of the firm's high-density materials are made by powder metallurgical (PM) processing, metallic encapsulation and hot isostatic pressing (HIP) or hot pressing, though other green body forming and pressureless sintering processing methods are frequently employed. For specialty applications, the firm frequently synthesizes their own powders to produce bulk articles. This results in improved ability to optimize the microstructure and purity of the final product for its intended application. The firm have done a great deal of work in the past few years to develop fine-grained, near theoretically density ultrahigh temperature materials based on the Group IV and Group V nitrides, carbides, and borides and even cermet mixtures thereof. Materials such as TaC, HfC, HfB2, HfN and elemental boron are particular specialties, but many other types of materials have been processed. The ultrahigh temperature materials development work typically supports DoD efforts to field next-generation ultrahigh temperature materials for rocket/missile propulsion and hypersonic vehicle platforms, but many other markets can make use of this interesting, high performance family of materials.
