Ceramic Injection Moulding of engineered glass-ceramics: Boosting the rare-earth free photoluminescence

The obtaining of dense ceramic pieces with versatility of size and shape is a much sought-after objective. Powder Injection Moulding (PIM) and Ceramic Injection Moulding (CIM), in particular, is a well-known technology that allows preparing this kind of complex parts with great variety of materials and at large production volume in a cost-efficient way. Usually, this process provides structural materials for mechanical and conforming purposes, but very few works have focused on manufacture functional porcelains. In this work, CIM method is used to process rare-earth free glass-ceramics with photoluminescent properties. The CIM parameters are optimized to obtain dense ceramic parts based on Na-rich plagioclase previously designed. The CIM processed samples show a higher structural disorder as studied by XRD and Raman spectroscopy and variations of the micro-nanostructure, in comparison with conventional ceramic processed samples. Photoluminescent emission studies show an increase of almost one order of magnitude on the UV-blue emission, due to the rise of the structural defect population generated by the CIM process. The CIM process, thus, provides results that boosted the use of rare-earth free materials for luminescence application having complex shapes.