The continuous strides forward in science and technology lead to ever increasing demands on materials. Ceramics have significant advantages characterised by their outstanding physical, chemical, mechanical, thermal and/or electrical properties.

This opens the door to a wide variety of application possibilities when other materials fail to perform, while maintaining great versatility and freedom in the design of components.

The inherent hardness of ceramic means that manufacturing complex shaped ceramic components by standard machining processes can be expensive. Other manufacturing processes such as dry pressing or extrusion limit part complexity. More recently, there has been a change in philosophy in component manufacturing, paralleling the benefits of computation. There is a discernible move away from the energy inefficient and wasteful practice of machining off material, towards more efficient net-shape fabrication. This in turn has allowed production engineers and product designers to improve productivity, lower manufacturing costs and improve product performance.

CIM offers an economic solution for delivering repeatable, ultra high precision ceramic components. Allowing engineers great versatility and freedom in the design of advanced ceramic components. Designs previously rejected as too difficult or expensive to manufacture using other production techniques are made commercially possible. Features such as re-entrant angles, multi-shaped blind holes, screw threads, surface profiles, perpendicular holes, undercuts and intricate cavities are all possible using CIM technology.