Ceramic Manufacturing Research Articles

Machine learning-based design for additive manufacturing in biomedical engineering

While ceramic additive manufacturing (AM) technologies have shown great promise to create functional scaffolds with tailored biomechanical properties, the true potential of these advanced techniques has not been fully exploited yet due to lack of practical design optimisation approaches. To address this challenge, a machine learning (ML)-based design approach is proposed herein where ceramic 3D printing techniques are combined to fabricate functionally graded tissue scaffolds composed of Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces (TPMS), aiming to fulfil the anticipated biomechanical requirements for the target bone regeneration outcomes. The proposed ML based design strategy couples a Bayesian optimisation (BO) algorithm to enable time-dependent mechano-biological optimisation of the 3D printed ceramic scaffolds at a reasonably low computational cost. For a representative example relating to bone scaffolding in a segmental defect of sheep tibia, the simulated results demonstrate that the optimised functionally graded scaffolds significantly enhance bone ingrowth outcomes. Furthermore, a Lithography-based Ceramic Manufacturing (LCM) technique is employed to fabricate the optimised scaffolds based on the proposed ML-based design framework, followed by micro-CT analyses of the additively manufactured ceramic scaffolds to assess their geometric qualities. This study is expected to gain new insights into mechanical sciences on design for varying material conditions and provide an effective design tool for ceramic additive manufacturing.

Reducing High Temperature System Development Cycle Time and Cost with Additively Manufactured Connectors

Connectors are a fundamental part of Ozark IC’s high temperature modules from characterization and test packages to Ozark IC’s XNode® data acquisition and single-board computing modules. Development of rugged high temperature electronic systems requires the co-development of similarly rugged high temperature connectors. The design and development of connector solutions enable test and evaluation of high temperature systems which would otherwise require fulfillment of a commercial connector order. There is a nascent supply chain of rugged, high temperature-rated connector designs but manufacturer lead times for such commercial products can exceed an entire design, prototype, and test cycle. Such delays are incompatible with rapid design iterations and fail-fast strategies employed in the development of extreme environment electronics – especially when the design and test cycles can change the requirements or specifications of the connectors. Polymer and ceramic additive manufacturing techniques enable in-house connector fabrication and support a connector co-development cycle that complements the pace and interdependent requirements of high temperature system development. These solutions are simple and reliable under laboratory conditions, operating for thousands of hours at 200 °C [1] and hundreds of hours at 800 °C [2]. The use of proprietary connectors manufactured with additive techniques and digital tooling lends an extra degree of freedom to system design and enables the trade-off of connector with system design specifications that greatly accelerates system ruggedization. Electrical connectors represent the final interface between an electronics module and the outside world. A failure of a connector is a failure of packaging that makes the module opaque to the tester and renders the power and robustness of any electronic system moot.

Putting chaînes opératoires back in their workspace and tracking down their entanglements. The evolution of the Logardan workshop (Iraqi Kurdistan) at the end of the Early Bronze Age

Data from recent work at Logardan (Iraqi Kurdistan) makes it possible to approach the history of a vast ceramics workshop from a brand-new perspective. Indeed, not only do Logardan kilns and production structures constitute, at this stage, the largest Mesopotamian set of remains inherent to the manufacture of ceramics, but the extensive excavation of the workshop on several levels also offers the possibility of tracking the evolution of this workspace. This diachronic perspective was adopted on the basis of a techno-spatial analysis of the ceramic chaînes opératoires. First, in-situ ceramics were examined in order to reconstruct the different production techniques that were performed in the workshop. Then, the qualitative, quantitative, and spatial evolution of these different technical traditions were observed throughout the stratigraphic sequence and according to the location of the kilns and other work installations. The aim of tracing the history and spatial interaction of the techniques was to record the evolutionary dynamics of the relationships between the potters who worked at Logardan over several generations.

Delamination mitigation in additively manufactured Al2O3 via enhanced thermal postprocessing

AbstractManufacturing thick (>10 mm) alumina (Al2O3) parts through the ceramic additive manufacturing technique of digital light processing (DLP) is difficult due to the large amount of polymer that must be removed. Nearly 35–65 vol% of a fugitive UV‐curable polymer is used in commercial ceramic slurries in order to maintain shape through the DLP process. During the thermal debind, gases form and escape quickly due to pressure build‐up, leading to defects in the form of print layer delamination. Here, we analyze the polymer decomposition through thermogravimetric analysis in order to design a less aggressive thermal debind schedule through strategic thermal holds and decreased heating rates. The new schedule led to a 83% reduction in average delaminations per sample (from 6.9 delaminations per sample to 1.2 delaminations per sample) and up to a 100% increase in wall thickness (from nominally 10–20 mm). A complex, Al2O3 turbine rotor (with maximum wall thickness of 5 mm in the center hub section) of a JetCat P400 engine was fabricated to compare the new schedule to the manufacturer provided one. The improved thermal debind schedule produced a turbine rotor with no observable delamination defects.

Development of a New Evaluation Method based on Optical Coherence Tomography Observation to Obtain Information on Internal Structural Changes in Real Time and in Three Dimensions during the Ceramics Manufacturing Process

Development of a New Evaluation Method based on Optical Coherence Tomography Observation to Obtain Information on Internal Structural Changes in Real Time and in Three Dimensions during the Ceramics Manufacturing Process

Effect of slight short fiber aluminosilicate proportion on alumina slurry devoted to additive manufacturing: Rheological behaviour and final properties of sintered materials

Lithography based additive manufacturing (L-AMT) is a widely used additive manufacturing technique for the fabrication of ceramics like Al2O3. Al2O3 shows many favorable properties e.g. high temperature resistance, high hardness, and good corrosion and erosion resistance As a drawback, ceramics are generally brittle, limiting the achievable strength and toughness of the material. One approach to increase fracture toughness is by short fiber reinforcements. The scope of this work focuses on the processing of short aluminosilicate fiber reinforced alumina by lithography based ceramic manufacturing (LCM). As fibers tend to agglomerate when incorporating them into a ceramic slurry, different dispersing additives and amounts were investigated. Using 5 wt% Disperbyk 2155, a slurry containing 1 wt% of aluminosilicate fibers could be processed, showing a viscosity of 11 Pa s at 10 s−1 and agglomerates of maximal (45 ± 17) μm. This viscosity makes the material processable in L-AMT.

Predicting dimensional deviation for sintering-induced shrinkage of Al2O3 ceramics manufactured by vat photopolymerization: Using convolutional neural network

Ceramic additive manufacturing technology facilitates the rapid production of components characterized by intricate geometries. Nevertheless, the dimensional accuracy of ceramic components is often compromised due to anisotropic shrinkage occurring during the sintering process. This study introduces a dimensional deviation model to represent the size variations of cylindrical components after the sintering process. Moreover, the method is expanded to encompass annular components featuring both inner and outer contours, where contour shrinkage is subdivided into self-contour deviation and influenced deviation. Additionally, a convolutional neural network is employed to predict deviations by leveraging a novel learning strategy that utilizes the established dimensional deviation model of solid cylindrical ceramic components to acquire the unknown deviation model of annular component contours. The model has been validated using a solid cylindrical component with a radius of 10 mm, as well as an annular component with an outer contour radius of 9 mm and an inner contour radius of 4.5 mm. The verification results demonstrate that our model achieves accurate predictions of the shrinkage size for these components. The proposed model is expected to replace conventional shrinkage coefficient methods, providing more accurate and reliable predictions for practical applications.

Highly textured 3D-printed translucent alumina through pressure-assisted sintering

Templated grain growth is a promising method for the fabrication of translucent alumina ceramics and a possible way to circumvent light scattering due to birefringence. In the present paper the effect of temperature, heating rate and dwell time on grain size, orientation, hardness and in-line transmittance is investigated on 3D-printed textured alumina. The samples were prepared by lithography-based ceramic manufacturing (LCM) of suspensions with fine-grained alumina, seeded by high aspect ratio templates and sintered by spark plasma sintering (SPS). A fully developed textured microstructure was achieved at 1600 °C for 1 h, whereas sufficient in-line transmittance of 54.6 % at 550 nm was achieved at 1700 °C for 3 h, albeit at the cost of considerable grain growth and loss of microstructural texturing.

A Tailored Approach in the Bentonite-like Raw Material Characterization Using Thermal and Water Sorption Techniques

Clayey raw materials present a wide variety of uses depending on their specific composition. Bentonite-like clays are considered suitable candidates to be used in some industrial applications, such as pharmaceutics, catalysis, antibacterial agents or food additives because of their highly desired adsorption properties, concretely regarding water vapor behavior. In the present study, a specific methodology for the characterization of some clayey raw materials used in the ceramic industry and its correlation with water vapor sorption properties is presented. Six different clayey raw materials have been wholly characterized until their specific chemical formula are obtained, and their water vapor adsorption behavior was correlated to their specific composition. The whole protocol has been validated with certified standard reference materials. The obtained results show a relationship between montmorillonite content in clay with water vapor adsorption behavior and certain thermal events of clayey particles, which can help the industry to understand product behavior and characterization during ceramic manufacturing process.

Theoretical analysis of the quartic autocatalytic reaction of a thermally radiative ternary hybrid nanofluid in a stratified porous medium

Quartic autocatalytic form of chemical reaction has valuable interference in catalysis, manufacturing of ceramics, and production of polymers. Motivated by this, the present work examined the quartic autocalytic chemical reaction of an hybrid nanofluid in the presence of thermal stratification, radiation, porosity. Similarity transformation method was employed to convert the governing equations into ordinary differential equations. The existence and uniqueness of a solution was examined, and numerical solution thereafter obtained. Results obtained were shown in figures.

Ceramic additive manufacture applied to obtain new ZrO2 pieces through steel nozzle recycling

Ceramic additive manufacture applied to obtain new ZrO2 pieces through steel nozzle recycling

Automated Defective Ceramic Tiles Classification using Image Processing Techniques

Surface quality is one of the critical issues in the ceramic tile manufacturing industry. However, there are still large amounts of ceramic tiles manufacturers who use a manual inspection process to check the quality of the ceramic tiles’ surfaces. The manual inspection is time-consuming and has low accuracy. Additionally, the slow inspection process could not keep up with the production rate. Therefore, this study presents a solution where image processing techniques are implemented to construct an automated defective ceramic tiles classification. The process consists of a few phases which include image enhancement, image segmentation, feature extraction, and classification. The input image which is the ceramic tiles image was enhanced using the histogram equalization technique. The segmentation was done using Sobel and the global thresholding technique before the feature extraction process is implemented. Three shape features of mean intensity, area, and perimeter were extracted in analyzing the characteristics of each ceramic tile defect type of crack, corner, and edge. Then, the image was classified using the K-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) technique. A confusion matrix was used to assess the performance of the k-NN classification to 150 testing images. The overall mean accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity returned good performance at 93.34%, 89.93%, and 95% respectively. Thus, it can be inferred that the proposed automated defective ceramic tiles classification using image processing techniques was successful.

Ceramic Manufacturing Workforce in India: Trends, Relative Earnings and Its Determinants

India’s ceramic industry, characterized by the transitional shift from traditional craft to modern industry, is imbibed to economic growth and development. It has witnessed a dynamic change from all hands-on deck to no hands-on deck. With an aim to understand the change in ceramic manufacturing workforce in India, the paper has analyzed the latest trends of ceramic workforce participation over the time period 1993-94 to 2020-21 using the national sample survey office (NSSO) employment and unemployment (E&U) survey data from 1993-94 to 2011-12 and periodical labour force survey (PLFS) data from 2017-18 to 2020-21. The results showcased that there was a declining trend in the overall workforce participation rate at the end of E&U survey (2011-12), however, after replacing NSSO E&U survey data with PLFS data the overall workforce participation rate showed an increasing trend. However, the study found that there was a continuous decline in the ceramic workforce as the total per cent of overall workforce. Further study highlighted that there is a wide gap between the perday earnings of ceramic and non-ceramic workers. Non-ceramic workers have high per day earning as compared to the ceramic workers that hampers the willingness of the workers to work in this industry. The study has established the impact of various socio-economic variables on per day earnings of the workers using Tobit regression model. The level of education has a positive and significant relation with per day earning of the ceramic workers. Education helps in accelerating the per day earning of the ceramic workers. Furthermore technical education have a highest positive impact on the per day earnings of the ceramic workers.

Vat photopolymerization-based additive manufacturing of high-strength RB-SiC ceramics by introducing quasi-spherical diamond

Vat photopolymerization-based additive manufacturing of high-strength RB-SiC ceramics by introducing quasi-spherical diamond

Experimental Work on the Production of Ceramics of the Chirik-Rabat Culture

The article introduces the results, descriptions and analysis of the experiment on the reconstruction of the molding mass and the manufacture of ceramic vessels of the Chirik-Rabat culture (3rd–2nd centuries BC). The site adjacent to the pottery workshops of the Babish-mola 7 archaeological complex (Eastern Aral Sea region) was used as a landfill. There is the Akkyr hill nearby, abounding in reserves of clay raw materials. The experiment was conducted during the field research of the Chirik-Rabat archaeological expedition of the Margulan Institute of Archaeology in 2022. The main objective of this experiment was to determine all aspects of the production cycle for the manufacture of ceramic vessels – from collecting raw materials for the manufacture of ceramics, designing vessels, firing and ending with obtaining the result. During the experimental work, a search was carried out for clay deposits near the Babish-mola oasis along the riverbeds. The process of collecting organic matter (cattle manure) was carried out in the nearest settlement, located 60 km from the Babish-mola monument, for the admixture of chamotte, featureless fragments of ceramics from the monument were used. The vessels were formed on a single-disc turntable.

A simple preparation method and the rheological properties of high solid loading slurries for ceramic vat polymerization

Originally used for additive manufacturing of polymer parts, the vat polymerization process was modified to fabricate ceramic parts by filling the resin with ceramic powder. In this study, we present the development of a ceramic slurry for additive manufacturing of ceramics via the vat polymerization process. With the shorter preparation time, the developed ceramic slurry containing 45 vol% solid loading exhibits considerable stability (minimal sedimentation observed over seven days) and low viscosity (<3 Pa s) that can be spread easily with a blade. We demonstrate the printability of the developed slurry by printing various geometries alumina and zirconia. The capability of the slurry was further extended to the printing of alumina platelets to mimic a nature-inspired nacre-like structure. In conclusion, we demonstrated a way to quickly prepare UV-curable ceramic slurry and future work encompasses research on strengthening of the printed ceramics.

Recycling insight into the ceramic tile manufacturing industry

The ceramic tile industry is one of the most important industrial sectors in Italy, with almost 90% of the whole production located in the Emilia-Romagna region. In this paper, the waste management and recycling practices in force among Italian ceramic tile manufacturers are reported and discussed on the basis of performance indicators determined thanks to the elaboration of a large amount of industrial data collected in the period 2013–2020. In particular, parameters such as annual water consumption (Cw) and demand (Dw), recycling factor of solid waste (Rsw) and water (Rw) and different kinds of waste generated in the process have been monitored for three different production layouts. Such indicators exhibit that recycling is a well-established practice in Italian ceramic tile production and only a minor amount of hazardous waste (exhausted lime) is land-filled.

Sustainable ceramic tiles incorporated with waste fly ash from recycled paper production

Waste incineration is an effective solid waste disposal method; however, its by-product pollutants hinder its widespread adoption. This research aims to develop novel unglazed ceramic tiles by recycling industrial solid waste incineration fly ash (IWA) from recycled paper mills. Experimental investigations were conducted on ceramic tiles with IWA additions (0–30 wt%) and firing temperatures (1100 °C, 1200 °C, and 1300 °C). Various scientific tests, including XRF, XRD, strength, water absorption, thermal properties, heavy metal leaching, SEM analysis, and micro-CT analysis, were performed. The results suggest that the addition of IWA may deteriorate the technical performance of ceramic tiles; however, satisfactory performance can still be achieved by tailoring the firing temperature due to the existence of iron and calcium in the IWA, which narrows and displaces the densification temperature range. Remarkably, tiles with 30 wt% IWA, which completely replaced the flux materials and fired at 1300 °C, achieved the highest flexural strength (exceeding 30 MPa). These tiles exhibited promising attributes such as water absorption of 5.9%, an estimated energy saving of 33.86%, and compliance with heavy metal leaching limits. This study proposes a sustainable solution for IWA disposal by utilising recycled paper mill fly ash as a substitute for flux material in ceramic tile manufacturing. The findings contribute to minimising environmental impact and conserving non-renewable natural resources, supporting sustainable development.

Infrared irradiation to drive phosphate condensation as a route to direct additive manufacturing of oxide ceramics

AbstractThis paper introduces a fast, low‐temperature, pressureless process to chemically bind ceramic parts with the help of infrared (IR) irradiation and phosphate binder condensation. Ceramic components are synthesized from slurries of ceramic powders and Al(H2PO4)3 binder that are irradiated with short‐waved IR light capable of heating the system to 350°C. This irradiation is found to be sufficient to drive phosphate condensation, binding the ceramic powders together within a matter of seconds. The IR‐irradiated components show an increase in density and Vickers hardness. Layer‐by‐layer spraying and irradiation is demonstrated as a route to additive manufacturing using various ceramic chemistries. While further optimization is needed to control desired microstructure, this process of using chemically bonded ceramic binders with IR heating for additive manufacturing shows the potential to find applications in various ceramic systems, including refractories, bone implants, electronics, and thermal barrier coatings.

Future directions in ceramic additive manufacturing: Fiber reinforcements and artificial intelligence

AbstractResearch in the field of ceramic additive manufacturing (AM) has been rapidly accelerating, resulting in hundreds of publications and review articles in recent years. While strides have been made in forming near‐net and complex‐shaped ceramic components, challenges remain that inhibit more widespread implementation. In this perspective, we provide a meta‐analysis of recent review articles and highlight a deficiency in two areas of promising future directions to address remaining challenges. The first is incorporation of fiber reinforcements in printed parts to overcome the challenges of poor mechanical performance of monolithic ceramics. Recent work in the area has shown promise incorporating discrete fiber reinforcements as an easier use case given existing equipment limitations, but continuous fibers are needed to reach full toughness potential. Here, we overview some options and future directions bases on success in polymer composites. Second, artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, including machine learning (ML), are suggested in order to accelerate feedstock development and process optimization. While there has been very limited work to date in utilizing AI/ML techniques for ceramic AM, again inspiration and lessons learned are drawn from the polymer AM community.