Process Principles of Additive Manufacturing for 3D Piezoceramics
JANG S. 1, SON H. 1, PARK S. 1, SCHWENTENWEIN M. 2, HOFSTETTER C. 2, BAE C. 1
1 Korea Institute of Materials Sciences, Changwon, Korea (Republic of); 2 Lithoz GmbH, Vienna, Austria
Additive manufacturing has opened a new way of producing novel structures of piezoceramics via design freeform in the field of sensors actuators, transducers, and energy harvesting. However, a lack of understanding about additive manufacturing processes such as resolution, printing defects, and thermal stress have restricted real usage. Herein, we demonstrated three process principles to overcome the above limitations: rheological design, printing dynamics, and thermal stress control. First, understanding the correlation between hydrogen bonding and structural effect and following mapping of printable rheology provides high resolution and shape retention. Second, we investigated printing dynamics as a function of nozzle size, printing speed, and extrusion pressure and its relation to printing defects. Finally, a method for alleviating thermal stress through a mechanism study and a quantitative approach was suggested. The manufactured piezoelectric ceramic was applied to the accelerometer and showed piezoelectric performance comparable to the conventional.