3D printing silicon carbide ceramics
Application
High hardness and wear resistance make the production process become complicated. Driven by the need to achieve cost-effective complex ceramic components, additive manufacturing - 3D printing technology has gradually entered the field of advanced ceramic manufacturing such as silicon carbide and so on. SiC ceramic manufacturing technique combined with 3D printing has become one of the main development directions in current research and application. It can well solve the traditional ceramic materials’ problems in production that are difficult to form and process with complex shapes, long manufacturing cycle and high cost.
Achieving complicated design
With the increase of optical elements’ aperture, the integrated design of silicon carbide optical elements and supporting structures will lead to more complex structures of silicon carbide optical elements, which can be not achieved by adopting the traditional ceramic forming and sintering technique. It is urgent to carry out research on new manufacturing technologies and techniques of silicon carbide optical elements with complex shapes, so as to realize the preparation of low area density silicon carbide optical structure integrated elements for space remote sensing optical detection.
Solving challenge of silicon carbide ceramics’ difficulties to form
Silicon carbide ceramics are characterized by easy oxidation, difficult melting and high light absorption. Usually, the plastic or metal materials have fixed melting point. Compared with the plastic or metal materials, the ceramics, especially oxide ceramics, has a very high melting point, which can be pasted after being heated and melted. However, carbide ceramics have no melting point, which can be directly oxidized at high temperature. For example, silicon carbide can be oxidized into silicon dioxide, or other gases or directly decomposed under the action of laser. It will make it impossible to directly 3D print. It will only print the green body to be sintered.
Solving the challenge of carbon’s light absorption
At present, in most 3D printing SiC ceramic methods, the printing materials include low amount of solid content, high amount of silicon content and low amount of mechanical properties. It generally adopts chemical vapor deposition (CVI) or precursor impregnation pyrolysis (PIP) and other post-treatment processes to improve the solid content of materials to improve the comprehensive performance of ceramic materials. This may reduce the advantages of 3D printing SiC ceramic technology.