Subject injectable ceramics

Injection molding is used to fabricate ceramic components with complex shapes because cycle times can be rapid, injection molding can be a high-volume process. The major limitation is that the initial tooling costs of the mold can be quite high. The mold to fabricate an individual turbine blade can be > 10,000 and a mold for a turbine rotor may be > 100,000, but such molds are reusable since they are never subjected to high temperatures. 

Plastic forming methods in which a mixture of the ceramic powder and additives is deformed plastically through a nozzle or in a die provide a convenient route for the mass production of CCTamic green bodies. Extrusion is used extensively in the traditional ceramics industry and to a lesser extent in the advanced ceramics sector. Injection molding has been the subject of intense investigation in recent years, but it has not yet made any significant inroads in the forming of ceramics for industrial applications. 

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