Is direct microwave heating well suited for sintering ceramics?

This paper presents a thorough analysis of direct microwave heating as a sintering process of ceramic materials. It questions why susceptor-assisted microwave heating is used in most experimental works, although direct microwave coupling is preferable for taking advantage of the possible beneficial effects of the microwave field on the sintering phenomena. This issue was investigated by conducting both experiments and numerical simulations. The experiments consisted of sintering alumina and yttria doped zirconia powder samples in a 2.45 GHz resonant cavity with automatic thermal monitoring, whereas the numerical simulations coupled electromagnetics, thermal transfer and sample deformation. Alumina and yttria doped zirconia are widely used materials and they exhibit different microwave field behaviours (transparent and absorbent, respectively), which are representative of most ceramic materials. The influence of the insulating material was discussed by considering different sintering cell designs. The very low coupling capacity of alumina made its direct heating very difficult. It was therefore necessary to apply a strong electric field to heat it. This situation promoted the absorption of microwave energy by other elements such as the insulating material, leading to heating instabilities and degradation of the insulation cell. In the case of zirconia, its coupling properties change abruptly with increasing temperature. It is poorly absorbent at low temperature, highly absorbent at intermediate temperature and it finally becomes reflective at the end of the sintering process. The consequences of this behaviour are (i) a very difficult control of direct heating (ii) a propensity to form damaging hot spots and (iii) the impossibility to reach high temperatures without forming plasma. Therefore, this experimental and numerical study showed that direct microwave heating is not suitable for conducting reliable and homogeneous sintering of classical ceramics. This explains why susceptor-assisted heating is most of time preferred.