Equipment, material and processes for UV-DLP-based additive manufacturing of two-component ceramic green bodies and dense structures

In medical as well as technical applications, multi-material ceramic structures can be used to realise enhanced solutions with integrated functionalities. This paper introduces a modular machine design, specifically developed photosensitive ceramic based (ZrO2) slurry materials, and processes to produce green bodies consisting of two slurry materials in an automated process flow. In manual tests single- and multi-material structures consisting of the developed slurry materials were laminated to determine whether it was possible to manufacture dense green bodies and sintered ceramics in a layer wise approach. Furthermore complex mono-material green bodies were manufactured using the developed test stand with an automated process flow. Subsequently, green bodies were sintered to dense ceramic components. Based on these results simple bi-material green bodies have been produced using contactless industry standard dispensing technology to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. It has been shown that this Additive Manufacturing (AM) approach is capable of producing complex single material green bodies which have been sintered to dense ceramic components (>99%) as well as simple green body structures consisting of two zirconia material variants.