Additive Manufacturing of Dense Barium Titanate Ceramics

Barium titanate (BTO) is a ceramic material that is widely used and studied due to its dielectric and piezoelectric properties. Many researches have shown that the geometry of electronic components has pivotal effect on their functionality and performance. However, the conventional fabricating methods do not enable the formation of complex geometries. The solution can be found in additive manufacturing processes, commonly known as 3D printing.

A major challenge in bottom-up approaches such 3D printing is to bind the small "building blocks" together effectively and with as minimal impact as possible on the desired properties characterizing the bulk material.
A common way to address this challenge is by integrating organic polymers as binders. Following printing, the organic fraction either solidifies and remains in the final hybrid structures, or decomposes during a post printing heating process, leading to less dense ceramic structures. In both cases inferior dielectric properties are achieved.

in this research we have developed an all-inorganic BTO ink for 3D printing. The ink is composed of BTO particles and inorganic binder which consists of amorphous BTO that is synthesized by sol-gel reaction. By tailoring the rheology of the ink, we successfully obtained dense ceramic objects which are fabricated by "direct ink writing" 3D printing method.