The reasons vary, depending on the set-up of your experiments. To find out the reason, you need to give furher details about the preparation procedure as well as your experiment parameters.

Primarily you have to think about not enough T, not enough pressure, and presence of oxygen during heat-up.

Hamed Bakhtiari , Anton Pshenichnikov

I have prepared stainless steel without TiC at same conditions and parameters, the surface looks good.

Hi Basheer,

TiC nanoparticles tend to agglomerate and these agglomerates are not broken down by mixing with coarse metal powder. In addition, fine TiC particles and agglomerates oxidize and therefore do not form any chemical compounds with metal particles. When such mixtures are sintered, the agglomerates impair the sinterability of the metal matrix.

For the reasons mentioned above, you will not find the individual particles in the structure, but rather large and porous TiC / TiO2 agglomerates that not only do not solidify the sintered body, but also massively weaken it. The properties of the material will be correspondingly miserable. The idea of mechanically distributing nanoparticles in a sintered body is not even theoretically feasible.

Regards

Vadim

In my opinion by adding new components (sepecially some nanoparticles) with high ability to react with oxygen you have significantly changed the system. Why do you think that taking same parameters you should get the same good result?

And by the way, I mostly agree with Vadim. Regards