Introduction

Abstract

The strong interest to the refractory carbide materials [1-11], which spread all around the world in the last few decades, has initiated a real boom of publications devoted to their syntheses, properties and various technical applications. In the most popular among the researchers in the 1970-90s book on refractory carbides published by Edmund K. Storms [4], the chapters, where syntheses and properties of titanium and vanadium carbides were described, amounted to 16 and 13 pages, respectively; although, almost all the appeared at that time in literature publications on these topics were analyzed or at least mentioned by Storms in his book. Preliminarily collecting all the binary, ternary and multicomponent carbide containing phase diagrams in the chapter, devoted to carbon (graphene/graphite) in Volume I [1], and excluding all the information directly concerning any carbide synthesis issues, the author of this series of books has hoped to place the data on physical and chemical (with the examples of composite design) properties of all twenty ultra-high temperature carbides, earlier listed in the introduction to Volume II [2], exclusively in one book (volume). However, in reality to describe in the acceptable way for the readers/users in the 2010-20s the main properties of only transition metal carbides of 4 and 5 groups has appeared to become possible only in two “thick” books, where the chapters devoted to titanium monocarbide TiC_1–x and vanadium monocarbide VC_1–x, already mentioned above and presented namely in this book, Volume III of the UHTM series (especially marked out with bold borders in Table 1.1), have raised significantly in the comparison with Storm’s book [4] and achieved in the author’s manuscript up to 504 and 193 pages, respectively.