Microwave Assisted Selective Laser Melting of Technical Ceramics

Direct processing of near fully dense technical ceramics is not possible with conventional additive manufacturing (AM) processes due to the very high temperatures that are required. Therefore, indirect AM approaches are often used. These indirect processes show great potential but require extensive post processing (e.g. debinding and sintering) leading to shrinkage, limited geometrical accuracy and eventually limiting overall part quality. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel Microwave Assisted Selective Laser Melting process that enables direct processing of technical ceramics.