Fused Filament Fabrication of Ceramic Components for Home Use

Abstract

Ceramic materials offer a variety of desirable material properties, but due to being particularly hard and brittle, are challenging to machine in subtractive processes. Additive manufacturing of ceramics parts requires costly machines and raw materials, limiting the use of additively produced ceramic parts to the professional realm. Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) has become a widespread additive manufacturing technology, due to low cost of machines and materials (typically polylactic acid (PLA) and ABS)). This paper addresses the suitability of the FFF process to manufacture ceramics parts cost-effectively. There are many “effect” filaments for FFF use, e.g. with metallic powder content (glitter effect), wood powder (biobased raw materials) or inorganic filler (stone effect). The purpose of this research is to study FFF-derived ceramic parts, which do not only contain a certain fraction of inorganic particles in a polymer matrix, but which have been debindered and sintered to yield “true” ceramic parts comparable to those from a conventional ceramics manufacturing process. The experiments have focused on FFF-printing available filaments, debindering (using solvents and heat) and sintering (using heat). Commercially available ceramic filaments were identified, all of them having a polymer matrix. For comparison, industrial grade machines for all common additive manufacturing processes for ceramics are listed, with prices that partly exceed € 250,000. During the practical experiments, the filament, containing 60% by volume of zirconium silicate, was successfully printed. The printed specimens were subsequently debindered and sintered with success, but the formation of pockets of trapped air could not be avoided completely during the debindering process. This paper shows that basically, FFF-made ceramic components. Semi-professional “makers” can use ceramic filaments on FFF printers, and apply post-processing in the steps of debindering (chemically with solvents or thermally) and final sintering to obtain parts.