Fused Filament Fabrication of Small Ceramic Components

Dorit Nötzel; Ralf Eickhoff; Thomas Hanemann

doi:10.3390/ma11081463

Fused Filament Fabrication of Small Ceramic Components

Materials (Basel). 2018 Aug 17;11(8):1463. doi: 10.3390/ma11081463.

Authors

Dorit Nötzel^{1

2}, Ralf Eickhoff³, Thomas Hanemann^{4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute for Applied Materials, 736344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany. [email protected].
² Laboratory for Materials Processing, University of Freiburg, 79110 Freiburg, Germany. [email protected].
³ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute for Applied Materials, 736344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany. [email protected].
⁴ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute for Applied Materials, 736344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany. [email protected].
⁵ Laboratory for Materials Processing, University of Freiburg, 79110 Freiburg, Germany. [email protected].

Abstract

With respect to rapid prototyping of ceramic components, there are known only a few processes (stereo lithography, binder jetting). In this work, a new process chain is described in detail, showing that ceramics can be printed in a very cost-efficient way. We developed a ceramic⁻polymer composite as filament material that can be printed on a low-cost fused filament fabrication (FFF) desktop printer, even with very small nozzle sizes enabling very small geometric feature sizes. The thermal post-processing, with debinding and sintering, is very close to the ceramic injection molding (CIM) process chain.

Keywords: 3D printing; FDM; FFF; ceramic printing; polymer-ceramic composite; rapid prototyping.