The powder injection molding process having advantages in manufacturing three-dimensional precision parts essentially requires a debinding process before sintering to remove the binders used for preparing feedstock. In this study, powder injection molding of translucent alumina was performed, and carbon dioxide (CO2) is used as a supercritical fluid that makes it possible to remove a large amount of binder, which is paraffin wax. The relationship between the optical property of translucent alumina and the debinding condition (temperature and pressure) of supercritical CO2 was investigated. As temperature and pressure increased, extraction rate of the binder showed rising tendency and average grain size after sintering process was relatively fine. On the other hand, optical transmittance was reduced. As a result, the debinding condition at 50˚C and 20 MPa that represents the lowest extraction rate, 8.19x10-3m2/sec, corresponds to the largest grain size of 14.7μm and the highest optical transmittance of 45.2%.

Translucent alumina is a potential candidate for high temperature application as a replacement of the glassor polymer. Recently, due to the increasing demand of high power light emitting diode (LED), there is a growing inter-est in the translucent alumina. Since the translucent property is very sensitive to the internal defect, such as voids insideor abnormal grain growth of sintered alumina, it is important to fabricate the defect-free product through the fabricationprocess. Powder injection molding (PIM) has been commonly applied for the fabrication of complex shaped products.Among the many parameters of PIM, the flowability of powder/binder mixture becomes more significant especially forthe shape of the cavity with thin thickness. Two different positions of the gate were applied during PIM using the disctype of die. The binder was removed by solvent extraction method and the brown compact was sintered at 1750oC for3 hours in a vacuum. The flowability was also simulated using moldflow (MPI 6.0) with two different types of gate.The effect of the flowability of powder/binder mixture on the microstructure of the sintered specimen was studied withthe analysis of the simulation result.