CONTOUR CRAFTING OF ADVANCED CERAMIC MATERIALS

Contour Crafting (CC) is a novel additive manufacturing (AM) technology that can fabricate parts with high geometric accuracy at relatively high speed using a variety of materials including ceramic oxides. The CC technique is a layer-by-layer fabrication method empowered by a computer-controlled trowel mechanism which produces remarkably thick layers with high surfaces quality. The current study presents the preliminary results and recent developments in fabrication of dense ceramic parts through processing by CC. Alumina (Al2O3) powder was selected as the starting material to establish the expansion of using CC as a processing route into high performance ceramics. Processing parameters in the CC machine such as extrusion rate, layer thickness, as well as materials parameters such as rheology, powder/water ratio and green density, and also final product parameters including density, hardness and dimensional integrity were studied. It is shown that the dense parts produced by CC are capable of exhibiting promising mechanical properties thereby assuring that the fabrication method has the potential to be used in production of a wide range of advanced ceramic materials.