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3D printing ceramic nanoparticles with lasers
Neil Baugh
December 06, 2023
TLDR: 3D printing complex shapes out of ceramic nanoparticles using light
J. Sänger, Adv. Mat., 2022
Big Takeaways
Light-based 3D printing is useful for materials that are hard to process, like ceramics
This printing style requires a transparent liquid solution to work, but ceramic solutions are typically not clear
Using ceramic nanoparticles makes the solution transparent, allowing for light-based 3D printing
Go look at all the crazy shapes they made even if you’re not reading any further
The Problem
Ceramics are used in everything from dentistry to train brake pads. They’re extremely temperature resistant, have good chemical stability, and have high strength.
However, ceramic parts are difficult to make due to these same properties. For many materials, we simply melt them and cast them into molds to make parts. For ceramics, this is a huge pain because they melt at extremely high temperatures.
For example, the authors in this paper worked with yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ for short). YSZ melts at around 4892 °F, about double the temperature of steel.
Even when melt-processing is possible, you can’t make complicated shapes with it. This is a big problem for ceramics because certain patterns give them better strength, toughness, etc while letting you reduce the amount of material used.
The Solution
Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, massively opens up what designs we can make.
A type of light-based 3D printing called 2 photon polymerization (2PP) uses light to create solid materials from a liquid. During 2PP, a laser causes specific portions of the liquid to solidify into the desired shape. You’re basically using a laser to draw a 3D object in a liquid. Here’s a nice example of a related light-based 3D printing technique being used to make the Eiffel tower.
One problem, liquid solutions of ceramics (called slurries) aren’t clear. Meaning the light can’t get through to solidify them, making light-based printing mostly useless.
The authors solved this by making the ceramic YSZ particles in their slurry so small that they don’t reflect light. Their particles were ~30 nm which is 500x smaller than the smallest human hair. This made their slurry clear and the 2PP printing work much more effectively.
They mixed these small particles in with a polymer with specific chemical groups (acrylates) that form bonds when exposed to light, causing the mixture to solidify.
J. Sänger, Adv. Mat., 2022
They showed off the use of their technique by 3D printing the complicated shapes above and comparing their mechanical properties.
The hollow cube (top right) was just as strong as the solid cube (top left) but 44% lighter. Even more impressive, the crazy shape called a hollow SchwarzP lattice (bottom right) was also just as strong, but nearly 70% lighter.
These demos show the power of light-based 3D printing for making ceramics. The ability to make complicated shapes opens up new applications needing custom pieces and reduces material costs while not sacrificing quality in any way.
Remember this next time you’re on a plane; the engine might be a 3D-printed ceramic.
See you next week for more science,
Neil
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