Ceramics Fabrication Using Rapid Prototyping of Mask Projection Stereolithography

Abstract

The aim of this study is to present a ceramics forming technique based on the mask projection stereolithography with a UV-LED light, which can impel homemade photo-curable β-TCP ceramic slurry to cure. During the manufacturing, the various masks can be dynamically created by a digital micromirror device (DMD) through switching on and off the small mirrors. By experiments, the photo curable properties of homemade ceramic slurry are determined for the critical exposure intensity(Ec) of 14.24 mJ/cm2 and the penetration depth (Dp) of 149 μm. Process optimizing parameters are determined for 100μm layer thickness, 54 mJ/cm2 exposure intensity and 3 s exposure time. Porous ceramic scaffolds were fabricated with complex network structure. No cracks and obvious holes are found in the surface and interior of sintered ceramic parts, whose compressive strength is up to 63 MPa, which can satisfy the mechanical requirement of the bone tissue engineering application. Therefore, the mask projection for ceramic stereolithography presented in this work is feasible to directly print porous and complex structure of ceramic green parts, which is expected to simply make ceramic bone scaffolds with complex structure.