Filigree and free-standing structures consisting of sintered yttria stabilized zirconia with different geometries and sizes demonstrating the sub-micron resolution, (ul) Bus, (ur) BAM-Fred, (ll) Test-Artifact, (lr) hollow printed SchwarzP-structure
Source: BAM
Additive Manufacturing or 3D-Printing technologies allow constructing parts with geometries, which are not accessible with conventional manufacturing technologies. Especially technical ceramics like zirconia are even hard to shape with conventional methods like milling, but have inherent properties, which are favorable for technical or medical applications. Those can be their thermal and mechanical stability or their chemical or abrasion resistance as well as their unique electrical properties and biocompatibility.
Ceramic Additive Manufacturing is a thriving field in research and industrial development but was until now not accessible for the 3D-printing technology with the highest precision, the so called Two-Photon-Polymerization. This light-based processing technology urgently requires a transparent feedstock. This counteracts with the ceramic particles in the feedstock needed to form fully ceramic structures after the 3D-printing process. By utilizing ceramic nano-particles, with a size of 5nm, the light scattering at the particle surface could be reduced to a minimum leading to transparent feedstock with ceramic weight fractions of up to 80%.
This feedstock enables the production of filigree yttria stabilized zirconia (YSZ) structures with a resolution of 500nm, which was until now unmatched with powder processes for technical ceramics. Sintered structures are, partially by design, comparably less dense than conventionally manufactured zirconia parts, but their compressive strength of up to 4.5 GPa is equivalent to their conventional counterparts or even higher.
A new dimension of 3D-printing is now accessible for technical ceramics and opens the field to alter the mechanical properties by design, a ceramic meta material is created.
Entering a New Dimension in Powder Processing for Advanced Ceramics Shaping
Johanna Christiane Sänger, Brian Richard Pauw, Birte Riechers, Andrea Zocca, Julian Rosalie, Robert Maaß, Heinz Sturm, Jens Günster
published in:
Wiley Online Library, 2208653 (2022), pages 1 to 21
BAM Materials Engineering
BAM Advanced Multi-materials Processing