Program Objective

Advanced Ceramics require lengthy and expensive prototyping procedures for new product development. The major difficulty in incorporating parts manufactred by these materials in designs, is their poor design-to-manufacture cycle time, typically involving time-consuming multi-step processes for each prototype iteration.

Rapid prototyping and manufacturing techniques (also known as Solid Freeform Fabrication, SFF) for advanced ceramics have been developed to make these components commercially viable. We have identified the Fused Deposition Method (FDM) as the best approach available for adaptation to the rapid processing of advanced ceramic materials. The FD process affords a wide range of operational windows that allow for the creation of a new generation of advanced ceramics with spatially distributed microstructures. Complex and intricate structures are also possible with this process.

The objective of this effort is to effectively demostrate the feasibility of the Fused Deposition of Ceramics (FDC) procedure and develop the associated technology to manufacture functional components of advanced ceramic materials. We estimate that this effort will result in half the number of steps required in typical component manufacture while also reducing the prototype fabrication time at each iteration to a matter of weeks.