Nanotechnology and Powder Processing for Ceramic Microfabrication : Nanotechnology based processes for the fabrication of high precision ceramic microcomponents

This book is set out to introduce a high precision ceramic fabrication approach suitable for mass production. A group of new processes have been developed and the results are characterized for fabrication of high precision ceramic oxides and composite microcomponents using soft lithography and colloidal powder processing. The book can be divided into four main sections. In the first section fabrication processes high precision hard and soft moulds were studied. In the second section, water, solvent and paraffin wax slurry systems were tested to fill PDMS soft moulds. A comparison study was carried out to choose the best slurry system based on their outputs. In the third section, different ceramic powder sizes of both alumina and zirconia were used in experiments. The work includes detailed characterisation of slurries, green and sintered microcomponents. In the fourth section, the proposed techniques were extended to fabricated homogenous and gradient profiles zirconia/alumina composite microcomponents with tailored properties.