Today, additive manufacturing processes such as stereolithography (SLA) are used to produce complex shaped parts with adequate geometric accuracy. If the interest of this process lies in the economy of material and the speed of shaping, the fact remains that the amount of organic matter used is very important. This organic content is a serious hinder on the development of this technology, because the thermal debinding time required to remove the organic compounds remains very long (several days). Microwave heating is now used at low temperature for the synthesis of powders or at much higher temperature for sintering ceramic materials, since the characteristic times for this process are much shorter than those required for conventional heating.
The objective of our work was to use microwave heating, in a single-mode cavity whose electromagnetic field is well controlled, for the debinding of materials shaped by SLA. This device has been fitted with a precision balance to monitor in situ the loss of mass during debinding of alumina-based materials. Thus, model pieces have been produced from alumina suspensions on the basis of several formulations (with a single monomer, two monomers or three monomers) dedicated to stereolithography. A method based on that of the master sintering curve was used to model debinding, which should make it possible to indicate the best thermal cycles suitable for the formulations.