One of the major drawbacks to these methods is high tooling costs and long lead times. Often, the tooling is prohibitively expensive and can take months to fabricate leading to delays in market introductions for new products. Moreover, tools eventually wear out and must be replaced. Complex porous ceramic preforms can be manufactured directly from a customers CAD file. The preform is loaded into a casting tool and precisely heated to a specified casting temperature under vacuum.
Molten metal is introduced, sealing the entire mold cavity region in vacuum.
MMCC can utilize many different matrix alloys to pressure infiltrate ceramic fiber, particulate and whisker preforms. The result is a porosity free net shape metal matrix composite component ready for finishing. This process has several advantages over other processes for composite manufacturing. First, unlike pressureless infiltration, a wide range of alloys can be used without regard to their wetting behavior. Second, unlike slurry casting or rheocasting, composites with high volume fractions of reinforcement can be cast.