3D PRINTING OF HIGH DENSITY BARIUM TITANATE STRUCTURES

Barium Titanate (BaTi03, BTO) is a ceramic material that is widely use and studied due to its dielectric and piezoelectric characteristics. It is used in various electronic devices such as capacitors, antennas and sensors. A few reports for fabrication of thin film BTO capacitors have been developed, such as by inkjet printing. The main disadvantage of this approach is that it is limited to thin films, thus limiting the resulting dielectric values and freedom of design. In order to obtain optimal dielectric values by using high BTO loading and density of the 3D objects, recently, a few reports showed 3D printing of BTO. For example, BTO structures printed by powder-jet method with a commercial binder resulted in voids in the object, with highest obtained density of 65%.
The aim of this research is to evaluate the 3D printing by liquid extrusion of BTO viscous dispersions, for obtaining highly dense antennas. Here we show how the density of the obtained structure can be significantly increased, thus resulting in higher dielectric values. In order to increase the density a ceramic binder was formulated, with low organic content. The binder contains nano-size particles of Barium Titanate synthesized by sol-gel method in an aqueous solution. After heat treatment for sintering, the mechanical properties, density and dielectric constant will
be characterized. Furthermore, radio frequency (RF) testing will be performed to investigate the feasibility of printing antennas in this technique.