For the past half a century, high-end applications such as mechanically and thermally loaded, mission critical components in aerospace, nuclear, racing, subsea applications, medical implants and more, have used hot isostatic pressing, HIP, to ensure consistent quality in removing pores and voids maximizing mechanical properties and reliable operation for components from both metal alloys and technical ceramics. 

Ceramic materials such as silicon nitride (HIPSN), high strength zirconia-alumina toughened systems (ZTA/ATZ) and polycrystalline transparent ceramics such as YAG, Mg-Al spinel, etc., are all today being used to take applications to a next level performance, applications such as bearings for electrical machines, to fight electrical erosion and allow for extreme loads at high rotational speeds, extended duration medical implants for high wear and load positions such as hip and knee joints, for laser and LED host materials, as scratch and impact resistant transparent panels, and more. 

Final densification of these powder components is realized through sintering operations at elevated temperatures, leaving the process engineers with the challenge to balance process parameters such as grain size and distribution, use of sintering aids, controlling grain growth for ultimate mechanical strength and handling high thermal stresses during cooling for large, complex size components made from low thermal conductivity/high thermal expansion material systems.  

State of the Art in HIP today is the HPHT (High Pressure Heat Treatment) capability as developed to integrate in-situ heat treatment processes with the HIP process, removing waste time and equipment from the processes route. The HPHT capability is built up from several distinct parts of hardware, software and disruptive process route thinking, where each individual part can be used for different solutions depending on material system and components size and shapes.  

The aim of this presentation is to show some of the new capabilities today available to the advanced, technical ceramics manufacturing society, capabilities such as “Clean HIP” for a controlled process atmosphere, “Steered cooling” making it possible to do CFD-FEM calculations to find cooling rates necessary to facilitate fast, consistent cooling segments for increased HIP productivity and quality, and/or a material/component purpose cooling rate and more.