Recently, as advanced ceramic industry has developed rapidly, more and more kinds of ceramic products are being used in various industries, and many new ceramic materials have been developed, especially zirconia ceramics and alumina ceramics. Among them, zirconia ceramic crucible, alumina ceramic crucible, zirconia ceramic pans and alumina ceramic pans are widely used for melting experiments of metal and alloy in research institutions. Due to similar performance of zirconia and alumina in some aspects, many users don’t know how to choose zirconia ceramics and alumina ceramics, and performance comparison will be introduced in the current article.

Density

Density of zirconia and alumina are shown in the table below:

Density of zirconia ceramic is about 1.5 times that of alumina ceramic, and zirconia has better compression resistance. In addition, microcosmic texture of zirconia is much better due to its higher density.

Surface Finish

Zirconia ceramic structural parts have a higher surface finish. It is mirror-like, extremely smooth and has less friction with the mesh. Use of zirconia can further extend life span of equipment and greatly reduce friction losses. In addition, toughness of zirconia ceramic structure is excellent, which results in overcoming inherent brittleness of the ceramic itself. Wear resistance is higher, so service life of the product is greatly prolonged, and the quality is also obviously improved.

Tenacity

To compare tenacity of the two type of materials, tensile strength of them are show in the table below:

Toughness of zirconia ceramics is about 4 times that of alumina ceramics. To compare it more vividly, suppose that the two ceramic materials are free to fall from the height of one meter at the same time, then zirconia will only have some gaps, while alumina will be broken.

Friction Coefficient

Friction coefficients of the two materials are show as the table below:

Generally, according the comparison above, it can be judged that performance of zirconia ceramics is better than that of alumina ceramics due to its high hardness, good wear resistance, high toughness, low friction coefficient and good corrosion resistance. As newly developed ceramic after alumina ceramic, it’s becoming an important structural ceramic for its good properties (such as its fracture toughness is higher than alumina ceramics), zirconia ceramic have attracted more and more attention, and its application prospect will become wider.