OPTIMIZED MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF ADDITIVE MANUFACTURED (AM) CERAMIC PARTS OBTAINED BY INKJET TECHNIQUE

Additive manufacturing (AM) has gained great technology development in the recent years, mainly in the field of metal prototyping and parts manufacturing. However, to this day there is a lack of research and development in the field ceramic additive manufacturing as well as ceramic AM materials with desirable metallurgical and mechanical properties. Powder metallurgy is currently the most used technique to produce ceramic materials for engineering applications which motivated the use of powder as base material for AM of ceramic materials. XJet has developed a unique AM technology that involves direct inkjet printing of Nano-powder with the desired composition loaded in organic carrier. Using this innovative technology from XJet, produced parts of 3-mol%-Y₂O₃-stabilized tetragonal ZrO₂ (Y-TZP) were investigated mainly in terms of sintering dwell time influence on the mechanical properties of the ceramic part. These experiments included, microstructure examination using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), density estimation, hardness test and 4 points bending in order to determine the microstructure development and changes, process defects analysis and Ultimate Tensile Strength (UTS) of the part .The obtained Y-ZTP ceramic parts obtained by XJet technology achieved density of up to 99.99% , average grain size of 420 nm, excellent mechanical properties of 890 MPa bending strength and hardness values of 1250 HV. The results obtained by the present study display improved mechanical properties of AM ceramic parts that meets the industrial standards and enable the production of geometrically complicated ceramic parts with enhanced functionality.