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Project summary
Ceramics have an established market in industrial
applications like metal forming, machining and some mechanical
components. Most ceramics are prepared by conventional powder metallurgy
(PM) and about 60 % of all components need some kind of post sintering
machining operation.
Electro Discharge Machining (EDM) is a process that could
machine these hard materials, providing that the ceramics have a sufficiently
high electrical conductivity. The major advantages of EDM are the accurate
machining and the ability to produce complex shapes.
Although some ceramic materials can be machined by EDM (e.g. TiN,
TiC,..), the EDM process and ceramic materials have never been
co-developed for each other.
The MONCERAT project aims the research in the development
of new electro-conductive ceramic materials as well as the
development of new EDM generators. An important aim of the
MONCERAT project is to gain a basic understanding on the interaction
between the ceramic material (e.g. microstructure) and the EDM
machining process. Further, the project aims to study how material
properties of EDM’d ceramic components can be integrated into the design
phase. The production of new ceramic materials will be partially
based on the use of high quality nano-powders produced by the SHS
process (Self propagating High Temperature Synthesis).
The MONCERAT project expects a large potential impact on the use
and development of ceramic materials for automotive, aerospace, machine
tool, process engineering, health care, biomedical, wear,
micro-mechanics and environmental applications.
The consortium consists of 11 partners from 5 European
countries. The uniqueness of the MONCERAT project is the strong
co-operation between ceramic material producers, EDM machine
builders and potential users (all SME’s) of ceramic materials in order
to extend the fundamental knowledge, needed to developed the ceramic
materials of the future that can optimally be shaped by EDM.
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