Digital Fabrication of Advanced Ceramics

Advanced ceramics are in demand across a variety of high-value manufacturing sectors covering healthcare, industrial systems, electronics, energy and aerospace. This is due to their unique material properties including excellent electrical characteristics, thermal insulation and high resistance to heat, corrosion, erosion and wear. Conventional manufacturing approaches involve templates and tooling to shape a ceramic material prior to thermal processing which inhibits customisation and design complexity. Significant recent attention has focused on adapting existing Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes to meet the future needs of ceramics. Common methods, such as stereolithography and binder jetting, have started to make progress; however, the limitations on processable materials, density, repeatability, high shrinkages and poor resolution is significantly hampering their widespread adoption. This studentship seeks to transform the accessibility and exploitation of advanced ceramics through the development of a digital fabrication process that overcomes the existing limitations of standalone AM techniques. This will be achieved by combining additive, subtractive and assistive methods working in unison to create precise, three-dimensional, multi-material, advanced ceramic structures. A focus on materials that are currently not compatible with existing AM approaches to accelerate the rapid adoption of this technology.

The objectives of this studentship are:
- Design and build a multi-process digital manufacturing platform.
- Produce a range of ceramic material formulations, with the required solids content and rheological properties to achieve dense fired ceramic parts
- Process development both in terms of printability and machining.
- Demonstrate the capability to produce complex 3D parts that have the required characteristics for advanced ceramic applications.