Multi-material ceramic hybrid additive manufacturing based on vat photopolymerization and material extrusion compound process

High precision ceramic components integrating multi-materials, multi-functions and complex structures present an increasingly wide range of application prospects in the fields of specialty industry, biomedicine, microelectronics, aerospace, etc. Currently, most of the additive manufacturing technologies can only realize single ceramic material or interlayer homogeneous ceramic distribution, which has serious limitations for the forming of multi-material complex structures in arbitrary space. In this paper, a multi-material ceramic hybrid additive manufacturing was proposed based on the compound process of vat photopolymerization and material extrusion for our self-developed 3D-printer. Considering the characteristics of ceramic materials with different viscosities , a multi-material additive manufacturing system was set up with the cyclic process of “coating-curing-blowing-extrusion-curing”. The curing behavior of various ceramic materials was studied and the accurate prediction model of the curing characteristics was established. In addition, the influence of material extrusion process parameters on the cleaning effect and extrusion line formation characteristics was analyzed, and a response surface regression model of extrusion line width and line thickness was formed. On this basis, the bonding quality and microscopic morphology of multi-ceramic material interfaces with coupling process by designing a typical multi-material model were focused on. The mechanism of the “gap phenomenon” at the multi-material interface was revealed. To ensure the effective bonding and accuracy of the multi-material interface, a process compensation strategy for the extrusion thickness parameter were presented. The results show that this technique can produce multi-material ceramic parts with high precision, good interfacial bonding and no defects. This system also demonstrates great potential to be loaded with other kinds of (e.g., metal, hydrogel, etc.) laser-curing extrusion slurries for printing.