Transient effects during catalytic binder removal in ceramic injection moulding

This work is part of a comprehensive study of the incidence and cause of defects in large section ceramic injection mouldings. In previous related work, the defects associated with mould-filling and with solidification and packing in the cavity were identified. Such defects sometimes manifest themselves only after binder removal or after sintering and so may be causally connected with those stages by mistake. In the present work, defects which do indeed arise from the binder removal stage itself as a result of minor process interruptions are isolated. These are identifiable by a pattern of defects which are distinct from those due to solidification and are independent of solidification conditions. This work reports on the systematic study of perturbations to conditions in the binder removal oven in order to track the origin of these defects and hence distinguish them from shrinkage-related defects.