Research Trends and Challenges of Additive Manufacturing of Polymer-derived Ceramics

As an emerging manufacturing technology, additive manufacturing technology, also known as 3D printing technology, has received extensive attention in recent years. Additive manufacturing technology has great potential in the industry of high-performance ceramics. It is expected to break the technical bottle neck of the traditional manufacturing technologies used for ceramic fabrication and greatly improve the flexibility of design and manufacturing of high-performance ceramics. This will provide a transformative impetus for the development of the manufacturing technology of the high-performance ceramic materials. Polymer-derived ceramics (PDCs) are a class of polymers obtained by chemical methods and can be transformed into ceramics by heat treatments, i.e., pyrolysis. Due to the good machinability and formability of the PDC materials themselves, the pre-forming of the designed target structures can be easily realized. These structures might not be possible with traditional ceramic manufacturing. Therefore, the combination of PDCs and additive manufacturing technology has attracted great attention from researchers. This review introduces characteristics of the additive manufacturing technology used for preceramics. Based on that, the present research status, trends and applications are also systematically described and discussed. The challenges and future directions of the additive manufacturing of polymer-derived ceramics are given for the guidance of future development.