A revision of the applications of the electrical discharge machining process to the manufacture of conductive ceramics

The term of technical ceramics or advanced ceramics is applied to a great emerging variety of materials, which have excellent properties such as hardness, wear resistance, corrosion resistance, mechanical strength, in a wide range of temperature, among others. Nevertheless, materials with high quality performance are also difficult to manufacture, and ceramic materials are not the exception. The majority of the ceramic materials are not conductive, but however, the use of new metallic pigments and compounds makes it feasible to become them conductive and, therefore, these ceramics can be machined by the EDM process. The present work is a review of the different applications of technical ceramics, concentrating on the conductive ceramics. Moreover, the machining processes that can be employed for their manufacturing are to be shown, focusing attention on the die sinking EDM process.