Application of 3D Printing Technology in Advanced Ceramic industry

Traditional ceramic molding methods, including dry molding, plastic molding, and grouting, all require the use of a pre-made mold to produce ceramic products with a certain shape and strength. The traditional process is time-consuming and costly. Compared with traditional manufacturing technology, 3D printing technology has the advantages of high efficiency, fast manufacturing, no mold, and can be complicated. Ceramic products need to be mainly processed by raw material powder treatment, green body preparation and molding, solid semi-finished product sintering and secondary processing,  among which the process of product molding takes the longest and the most expensive. In order to enable technical ceramics manufacturers to save raw materials, shorten product processing cycles, reduce manufacturing costs, and mass production of products during the production process, moldless ceramic molding manufacturing technology relying on 3D printing came into being.

The realization of ceramic material 3D printing technology depends on two systems. The one is a computer software system, which is used to design the structure and graphics, and converted into a universal code language; Print the final product. Secondly, it is an operating system that receives instructions, that is, used to output and print the final product.

The basic process is rough as follows:

① Establish a three-dimensional CAD model (computer-aided design), 

② Based on the discrete-superposition principle, slice it to obtain many separated planes.

③ Transfer to the molding system.

④ Use CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) to print the complete prototype parts layer by layer.

In reality, not all designed 3D models can be successfully printed. Because ceramic 3D printing molding technology is different from traditional 3D printing technology, the establishment of ceramic 3D models must be continuously optimized according to the requirements of actual samples.