Fused Filament Fabrication of Ceramic Components for Home Use

Abstract

Ceramic materials offer a variety of desirable material properties, but due to being particularly hard and brittle, are challenging to machine in subtractive processes. Additive manufacturing of ceramics parts requires costly machines and raw materials, limiting the use of additively produced ceramic parts to the professional realm. Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) has become a widespread additive manufacturing technology, due to low cost of machines and materials (typically polylactic acid (PLA) and ABS)). This paper addresses the suitability of the FFF process to manufacture ceramics parts cost-effectively. There are many "effect" filaments for FFF use, e.g. with metallic powder content (glitter effect), wood powder (biobased raw materials) or inorganic filler (stone effect). The purpose of this research is to study FFF-derived ceramic parts, which do not only contain a certain fraction of inorganic particles in a polymer matrix, but which have been debindered and sintered to yield "true" ceramic parts comparable to those from a conventional ceramics manufacturing process.