Wick Debinding – An Effective Way of Solving （灯芯脱脂-解决的有效途径）.pdfVIP

4 Wick Debinding – An Effective Way of Solving Problems in the Debinding Process of Powder Injection Molding Lovro Gorjan Jožef Stefan Institute, Research and Development Center for Ignition Systems and Electronics d.o.o., Slovenia 1. Introduction Powder injection molding (PIM) has been shown itself to be a successful shaping technique for producing complex-shaped ceramic, metal or cermet parts. The process starts with preparing a high solid loading suspension, where ceramic or metal powder is mixed with a thermoplastic material. At high temperature the suspension is fluid and can be injected into molds by applying a pressure. Inside the mold the suspension takes the shape of the mold and then cools below the melting point of the thermoplastic material and solidifies into a green body. After the molding cycle the green body consists of solid particles held together by the thermoplasic phase, which serves as a binder. The challenging and time-consuming operation in the powder-injection molding process is removing the binder from the green bodies prior to the sintering, without causing any deformation or cracks. The debinding process is difficult because green bodies contain relatively large amount of poorly volatile binder in the solid state, i.e. below the melting point. Debinding is usually achieved by slowly heating the green bodies, causing the binder to decompose an