CeraNova’s facility includes laboratory and manufacturing space with a wide range of specialized equipment for materials development and pilot or low-volume production. Our technical staff has extensive expertise in processing new materials and product development along with the manufacturing experience to put those developments into production.
Our proprietary methods provide significant advantages to produce cost-effective cutting-edge materials with controlled microstructures for high performance transparent and advanced ceramic products.
Powder Processing
CeraNova’s engineers use state-of-the-art nano-size powder processing methods that produce ceramic materials with superior performance. CeraNova has developed a variety of low and high energy milling methods along with thermal treatments to enhance and optimize powder particle size and surface properties for advanced manufacturing of high-performance products. Our thermal processing capabilities include ambient environment and controlled atmosphere furnaces that are customizable for different ceramic powder types and downstream processes.
We have established several methods for blending additives and sintering aids to improve powder processability and enhance microstructure uniformity in the finished product. CeraNova also has the capability to do custom compounding to produce ceramic/polymer feedstock suitable for extrusion and injection molding manufacturing processes.
Near Net Shape Forming
CeraNova has an exceptional ability to form complex shapes with highly uniform as-formed or “green” body properties which provides a compelling advantage over competing techniques and manufacturing methods. CeraNova’s forming processes can produce finished shapes and sizes that are not possible with other materials such as sapphire. Our processes are applicable for a wide range of component shapes and sizes, ranging from flat parts less than 1-inch or 25 mm in size to large 3D shapes such as conformal windows or nosecones having dimensions up to 20-inches or 500 mm.
The fabrication of near net shape ceramic “blanks” or as-fired parts that are ready for grinding and polishing to finished product dimensions enables significant cost savings by reducing material removal requirements and process times required for the downstream manufacturing steps.
CeraNova’s staff also has extensive experience with 3D printing of ceramics to produce custom parts with high surface areas, complex shapes, and internal geometries that cannot be achieved by any other method.
Thermal Processing
CeraNova maintains several laboratory, pilot, and production scale thermal treatment systems for processing ceramics from the as-formed state through full densification and post processing annealing.
Our on-site equipment includes controlled temperature/humidity environmental chambers as well as fixed temperature ovens for part drying. We also have multiple furnaces for pre-firing and full sintering. Our furnaces are equipped for controlled-thermal profiles and controlled-atmosphere operation including thermal treatment in air, inert, reducing, oxygen, and hydrogen atmospheres. Large capacity furnaces at CeraNova include large box furnaces capable of 1650 °C and part sizes up to 36 inches in any dimension. We also operate multiple small capacity box and tube type furnaces and ovens for development work and post-sinter annealing.
Optical Fabrication
CeraNova is growing and diversifying its optical fabrication capabilities to include grinding, polishing and metrology. Our in-house systems can provide cost-effective pre-grinding, fine grinding and polishing operations for some small to medium size optical or opaque parts. For certain products, CeraNova can deliver test coupons and prototype parts generated to a ground surface specification or finished to an industrial grade optical surface. We can also apply material removal process steps to parts “mid-stream” (prior to full densification) which can deliver even closer tolerance near net shape performance for the final product, and thus reduce finishing costs even further. Our in-house characterization capabilities include UV-visible and infrared transmission, coordinate measuring machine (CMM) equipment for dimensional measurements to 1-micron resolution, optical profilometry with angstrom level surface roughness capability, and laser interferometry for high resolution surface feature and transmitted wave front measurements.