Microwave Processing of Ceramics at the University of Utah Description of Activities and Summary of Progress,

An interdisciplinary effort to address certain modeling, measurements, and characterization aspects of microwave processing of ceramics was initiated at the University of Utah almost a year ago. The FDTD method was used to model EM power deposition patterns in single-mode cavities, some microwave sintering experiments were conducted in a multimode cavity and using SiC rods as process stimulus, and a wide variety of dielectric and thermophysical properties were measured on microwave and conventionally sintered samples. This paper summarizes these efforts and presents initial results.