Application of Computational Fluid Dynamic Simulation to SiC CVD Reactor for Mass Production

Silicon carbide (SiC) materials are typical ceramic materials with a wide range of uses due to their high hardness and strength and oxidation resistance. In particular, due to the corrosion resistance of the material against acids and bases including the chemical resistance against ionic gases such as plasma, the application of SiC has been expanded to extreme environments. In the SiC deposition process, where chemical vapor deposition (CVD) technology is used, the reactions between the raw gases containing Si and C sources occur from gas phase to solid phases; thus, the merit of the CVD technology is that it can provide high purity SiC in relatively low temperatures in comparison with other fabrication methods. However, the product yield rarely reaches 50% due to the difficulty in performing uniform and dense deposition. In this study, using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, the gas velocity inside the reactor and the concentration change in the gas phase during the SiC CVD manufacturing process are calculated with respect to the gas velocity and rotational speed of the stage where the deposition articles are located.