Sintering

Cubic zirconia

Weibull modulus

Ceramic

Composite material

Flexural strength

Materials science

Fused filament fabrication

Extrusion

3D printing

Molding (decorative)

Additive manufacturing

The aim of this study is the evaluation of powder injection molding (PIM) binder compositions for the material extrusion (MEX) additive manufacturing of zirconia parts. Four commercial PIM binder compositions were selected and mixed with 45 vol% of yttria-stabilized zirconia powder. Due to the brittle characteristic of the obtained ceramic feedstocks, a screw based pellet printing head was used for printing dense zirconia structures. To compare 3D printing performance, additionally a commercially available zirconia filament was used in this study. Application of PIM binder compositions was limited either due to phase separation during processing, poor printing performance or delamination during solvent debinding. Only one of the PIM based feedstock compositions could be successfully printed, debound and sintered. A ring-on-ring setup was used to investigate the equibiaxial flexural strength after sintering for both pellet and filament printed disks. For benchmarking, cold isostatic pressed (CIP) ceramic discs were fabricated by commercial, ready-to-press, zirconia powder. The ring-on-ring results showed a low Weibull modulus (3 <m<5) for all samples, regardless of the manufacturing process. Fractography on selected samples demonstrated, that the origins of failures are close to the area of the loading ring which indicates an uneven stress distribution along the contact area between the setup and the sample. The pointwise stress concentration is the reason for the immature failure of the samples and the low Weibull modulus. The characteristic strength and 90% confidence intervals were used to compare the strength of ceramic samples produced via additive manufacturing and CIP. Almost similar mechanical properties were obtained for the CIP pressed (σ0 = 657 MPa) and filament printed (σ0 = 531 MPa) samples. However, a lower strength was obtained by the pellet printed samples based on commercial PIM Binder (σ0 = 203 MPa). Fractography analysis indicated poor fusion of printed layers for the samples produced with PIM binder composition as the main reason for poor mechanical performance.

Material extrusion additive manufacturing of zirconia parts using powder injection molding feedstock compositions