As a contactless physical field, a steady magnetic field (SMF) is capable of acting on substances, which leads to changes in physical and/or chemical properties and to further influencing thermodynamic and kinetic behaviors at macroscopic, mesoscopic, and microscopic scales. The application of the SMF to material science has evolved into an important interdisciplinary field—the Electromagnetic Processing of Materials (EPM). Therein, the implementation of the SMF for the solidification of metals and alloys has been increasingly given attention. The SMF was found to regulate nucleation, crystal growth, the distribution of solutes and structure morphology during alloy solidification via various magnetic effects, such as magnetic damping, the thermoelectric magnetic effect, magnetic orientation and magnetically controlled diffusion. In this review, we briefly summarize the main SMF effects and review recent progress in magnetic field-assisted solidification processing, including nucleation, dendritic growth, solute segregation and interfacial phenomena. Finally, future perspectives regarding controlling alloys’ solidification using an SMF are discussed.

The improvement of densification and fracture toughness in high-entropy ceramics is important to realizing their practical applications. In this study, SiC whiskers and metal Ni additions were incorporated to solve these problems of high-entropy boride ceramics. The influence of sintering temperatures (1450–1650 °C) on the densification, microstructure, hardness, fracture toughness, and bending strength of (M_0.2Ti_0.2Ta_0.2V_0.2Nb_0.2)B₂-SiC_w-Ni (M=Hf, Zr, or Cr) composites prepared by hot-pressing technology were studied. Results showed that when SiC whiskers and metal Ni additions were used as additives, increasing sintering temperatures from 1450 to 1600 °C promoted the densification of high-entropy boride ceramics. This was mainly attributed to the high sintering driving force. However, when the temperature further increased to 1650 °C, their densification behavior decreased. At a sintering temperature of 1600 °C, these high-entropy borides ceramics all had the highest densification behavior, leading to their high hardness and fracture toughness. The highest relative density was 96.3%, the highest hardness was 22.02 GPa, and the highest fracture toughness was 13.25 MPa·m^1/2, which was improved by the co-function of SiC whiskers and plastic metal Ni. Meanwhile, in the adopted sintering temperature range of 1450 to 1650 °C, the highest bending strength at room temperature of these high-entropy boride ceramics could reach 320.8 MPa. Therefore, this research offers an effective densification, strengthening, and toughening method for high-entropy boride composites at a low sintering temperature.

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