Industrial microwave heating technology has emerged as a new ceramic processing technique. The unique advantages of fast sintering, high density, and improved materials properties makes it superior in certain respects to other processing methods. This work presents the structure characterization of a microwave sintered ceramic matrix composite.Commercial α-alumina powder A-16 (Alcoa) is chosen as the matrix material, β-silicon carbide whiskers (Third Millennium Technologies, Inc.) are used as the reinforcing element. The green samples consisted of 90 vol% Al2O3 powder and 10 vol% ultrasonically-dispersed SiC whiskers. The powder mixture is blended together, and then uniaxially pressed into a cylindrical pellet under a pressure of 230 MPa, which yields a 52% green density. The sintering experiments are carried out using an industry microwave system (Gober, Model S6F) which generates microwave radiation at 2.45 GHz with a maximum output power of 6 kW. The composites are sintered at two different temperatures (1550°C and 1650°C) with various isothermal processing time intervals ranging from 10 to 20 min.
