Net-shaping of ceramic components by direct ceramic machining

A new process called direct ceramic machining was successfully applied for the fabrication of dental restorations and technical components. It uses prefabricated, easy to machine ceramic blanks. The shape of a ceramic component is machined with enlarged contours to compensate for the sintering shrinkage. Afterwards the machined component is sintered to full density and thereby shrinks to its final dimensions. Technical components from 5 to 100 mm in size possessing features of 1/10th mm to several millimeters and dental restorations were fabricated sucessfully, and thus demonstrate the capability for rapid production of ceramic functional prototypes. The dimensional accuracy is about 20 mum with a relative accuracy of 0.1 per cent of the component's length. Thus accurate net-shape of the components could be achieved without hard machining.