Tailoring a Silver Paste for Additive Manufacturing of Co-Fired Ferrite Magnetic Components.

Lanbing Liu,Guoquan Lu,Yunhui Mei,Chao Ding

doi:10.3390/ma12050817

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM), or 3D-printing, has the potential for rapid prototyping of innovative designs of magnetic components used in power electronics converters. In this study, we tailored a silver paste as the metal feedstock of an extrusion 3D printer so that the metal would be compatible with a ferrite paste feedstock for 3D-printing of ferrite magnetic components. We focused on adjusting the metal formulation to match its shrinkage to that of the ferrite and to improve adhesion during the co-sintering process of the printed part. We found that a 5 wt % addition of ferrite powder in the metal paste can achieve matched shrinkage and strong adhesion. Evaluation of the co-sintered magnetic components showed no significant defects, such as cracks, warpage, or delamination, between the metal and ferrite. The shear strength between the two sintered materials was greater than 50 MPa, and the electrical resistivity of the sintered metal winding was less than twice that of the bulk silver, which is lower than those of most 3D-printed winding metals reported in the literature.

Highlights

Magnetic components are necessary elements in power converters and are often bulky and lossy
Silver started to shrink at received silver paste hadhad significantly mismatched profiles
We developed developed aa material material feedstock feedstock system system for for aa multi‐extrusion multi-extrusion 3D

Summary

Introduction

Magnetic components are necessary elements in power converters and are often bulky and lossy. Cores are fabricated by pressure-assisted molding followed by heat treatment, and metal wires are hand-wound or machine-wound around the cores. These manufacturing methods lead to a limited number of standard inductor and transformer structures available on the commercial market. Due to its versatility in shaping complex geometries, additive manufacturing (AM), or 3D-printing, has the potential to fabricate novel magnetic core structures. It can produce newly designed prototypes in days or hours for quick verification. There are a small number of studies [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]

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