The poor hardness of zirconia-toughened alumina (ZTA) with 5 wt-% CeO2 (ZTA5CeO2) ceramic has limited its applications as a cutting insert. Therefore, in this work, the possibility of MgO nanoparticles (20 nm) as reinforcement to ZTA5CeO2 ceramics was investigated. Mgo nanoparticles with different weight percentages (0-2 wt-%) were added to ZTA5CeO2 ceramics. ZTA5CeO2 with 0.5 wt-%MgO showed the highest fracture toughness of 9.14 MPa.√m. The addition of 0.5 wt-%MgO nanoparticles showed the excellent role of MgAl11CeO19 grains as a crack deflector, which consequently produced a reasonable hardness value of 1591 HV and lowered the wear areas to 0.0528 mm2.
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