Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing of Silicon Oxycarbide Ceramics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a rapid, high-resolution tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing method for creating complex silicon oxycarbide ceramic parts from preceramic polymers, overcoming limitations of traditional layer-by-layer techniques.

Contribution

It presents a novel tomographic volumetric printing process for ceramics, enabling faster, more flexible fabrication of complex 3D ceramic structures from photosensitive preceramic resins.

Findings

Successfully fabricated complex ceramic geometries including overhangs and hollows.

Produced dense ceramic microcomponents with high heat and chemical resistance.

Demonstrated faster and more flexible manufacturing compared to traditional methods.

Abstract

Ceramics are highly technical materials with properties of interest for multiple industries. Precisely because of their high chemical, thermal, and mechanical resistance, ceramics are difficult to mold into complex shapes. A possibility to make convoluted ceramic parts is to use preceramic polymers (PCP) in liquid form. The PCP resin is first solidified in a desired geometry and then transformed into ceramic compounds through a pyrolysis step that preserves the shape. Light-based additive manufacturing (AM) is a promising route to achieve solidification of the PCP resin. Different approaches, such as stereolithography, have already been proposed but they all rely on a layer-by-layer printing process which sets limitations on the printing speed and object geometry. Here, we report on the fabrication of complex 3D centimeter-scale ceramic parts by using tomographic volumetric printing which is fast, high resolution and offers a lot of freedom in terms of geometrical design compared to state-of-the-art AM techniques. First, we formulated a photosensitive preceramic resin that was solidified by projecting light patterns from multiple angles. Then, the obtained 3D printed parts were converted into ceramics by pyrolyzing them in a furnace. We demonstrate the strength of this approach through the fabrication of dense microcomponents exhibiting overhangs and hollow geometries without the need of supporting structures, and characterize their resistance to high heat and harsh chemical treatments.