A Study on the Variable Condition Debinding Process in Supercritical CO2for Removing Binder from Thick Ceramic Injection Molded Parts

The purpose of this study is to remove paraffin wax binder effectively from powder injection molded part using supercritical fluids in powder injection molding process. For a thin powder injection molded part about 1-2 mm thickness, paraffin wax binder can be removed rapidly without any defect by traditional supercritical extraction process which has fixed high temperature and pressure condition. But, for a thick powder injection molded part, there are limitations in removing paraffin wax binder by the fixed high process condition because crack occurs at the beginning step. Therefore, here we studied variable condition debinding process that starts with mild process condition at the beginning step and then increase the process conditions simultaneously at each step. To find out the initial process condition that has the highest extraction yield without any defect for each sample thickness, we investigated various supercritical debinding conditions using 1-4 mm thickness ceramic injection molded sample. By using the variable condition debinding process that starts with the initial process condition at the first step and then increasing process conditions simultaneously at each step (temperature from 333.15 to 343.15 K, pressure from 12 to 27 MPa, and CO2 flow rate from 1.5 to 10 L/min), over 95% of paraffin wax binder was removed from the 4 mm thick (10 mm diameter) ceramic injection molded disk samples within 5 hours.