The attractive properties of non-oxide ceramics are its high hardness, wear resistance, high temperature melting point and thermomechanical stability. This makes boride, carbide and nitride ceramics (like SiC, cBN, WC, TiCN, etc...) to be proposed for applications with harmful conditions of temperature, atmosphere, and erosion such as coating for re-entering space shuttle, deep drilling and mining, heat exchangers, nuclear vessels, etc .
Due to difficulty to be sintered as monolithic pieces non-oxide ceramic are usually processed with metallic additions acting as binder that additionally provide toughness. But metallic binders can be etching points when working under severe conditions of temperature or atmosphere. Additionally, most of them have high price and toxicity. For that reasons, there is a special interest in processing non-oxide ceramics with as-low-as-possible content on metals, but still enough to enable the sintering conditions. In this sense the colloidal approach to processing of powders allows a high dispersion of the different phases into a fluid and dispersed slurry favouring the mixing of the micronic mayor phases and nanosized minor one.

In this work colloidal processing is chosen to process powders due to the excellent dispersion resultant and the effect of nature, size and amount of metal in sintering is is described by dynamic sintering studies.