China's Flexible Ceramic Substance Can Bring Tech Revolutions

Ceramics are used in mechanical engineering, electronics, and aerospace industries, but their hardness and brittleness make it difficult to manufacture intricate parts.

China's Flexible Ceramic Substance Can Bring Tech Revolutions

Chinese researchers have created a new method for printing ceramics in 3D in the air without the use of support structures, making it possible to create shapes previously unattainable using conventional 3D printing methods.

Ceramics are used in mechanical engineering, electronics, and aerospace industries, but their hardness and brittleness make it difficult to manufacture intricate parts.

Complex ceramics with integrated structures and functions can now be produced quickly and conveniently using 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing (AM). It will only take 140 hours to complete “Europe’s largest 3D-printed building” in Germany.

To prevent the collapse of unsupported parts during traditional 3D printing of ceramics, additional supporting structures are frequently required. This additional skeleton not only reduces printing efficiency but also creates problems when the supports are removed.

Jiangnan University’s Professor Liu Ren and his team created a new printing paste and enhanced curing method that speeds up the material’s solidification, increasing 3D printing efficiency and doing away with the need for support structures.

The paste is a photosensitive ceramic slurry that, when exposed to near-infrared (NIR) light, quickly solidifies and gains strength, enabling it to maintain its shape in mid-air right away after being extruded from the nozzle.

The researchers demonstrated that NIR light can produce results superior to UV light, and that the cure depth of a slurry tested under NIR light can reach 1.02mm after 130 seconds.

This suggests that NIR light can penetrate materials more effectively than UV light. 3.81mm is reached after 3 seconds of NIR light exposure, allowing for more quickly produced prints.

At a rate of 1 mm per second, Liu and his team were able to print three-dimensional curved structures that stayed in shape even after being sintered. Because ceramic materials have a variety of photocuring properties, multi-material 3D printing is difficult.

By combining the sintering temperatures of ceramics with different properties, the team demonstrated the ability to print mixed ceramics using additives like iron red, chromium green, or yttria-stabilised zirconia.

The key to this technology, according to Liu in the paper, “is not only the elimination of the support required in a typical printing process, but also brings about many other advantages, such as reduced printing time, material usage, and post-processing workload.

The paper claimed that by improving ink constituents and printing parameters like nozzle diameter, extrusion pressure, motion speed, and light intensity, it may be possible to produce objects with higher resolution and distinctive aesthetics.

According to Liu, this novel 3D printing method has the potential to be developed further, and the ability to create ceramic shapes devoid of support will spur additional innovation and expand the use of additive manufacturing techniques.