Dimensional Control in Ceramics Printed by Projection Microstereolithography

Abstract

Ceramics, due to their high melting temperatures, are an attractive material choice when it comes to high-temperature applications, especially when combined with a metal to create a ceramic-metal composite, or a cermet. Because of this, a need to shape ceramics with greater flexibility than the traditional ceramic processing methods can allow has arisen. Additive manufacturing is a promising potential solution due to the highly flexible nature of the process compared to traditional methods. And, within additive manufacturing, projection microstereolithography, a process in which a photosensitive resin is exposed to pixelated images to cure a single layer at once, is an attractive method due to its increased resolution compared to other additive manufacturing methods such as binder jetting. In order to better control the projection microstereolithography process to allow for the production of dimensionally accurate parts, the curing of photosensitive resins with ceramic particles was studied. This study had two main parts: a resin composition study and a geometric parameter study. In the resin composition study, the different resin components were carefully varied in order to study their effect on curing. In the geometric parameter study, different projection areas, as well as the difference in curing behavior for both "negative" and "positive" features were studied. Through these studies, it was found that changing the resin components can change the curing behavior, as is supported in the literature. For geometric variables, there was a change in curing behavior in certain cases, but not necessarily all. This analysis on geometric variables is more detailed than others that have been done in the literature thus far. Overall, the results of these curing experiments will better inform printing ceramics using projection microstereolithography.