ABSTRACT
As discussed in Chapter 1, structural ceramics have tremendous applications in automobile, aerospace, semiconductor, and construction industries due to their excellent properties such as high hardness, strength, chemical resistance, stability at higher temperatures, low friction and thermal insulating characteristics. Numerous conventional and non-conventional machining techniques mentioned in Chapter 2 can be employed for fabricating different components from structural ceramics. However, this chapter focuses only on the laser machining of structural ceramics and presents the state of the art in this field. Different commonly used ceramics such as Al2O3, Si3N4, SiC, MgO, ZrO2, and AlN will be elaborately discussed.
