Professional Documents
Culture Documents
3, 2016
DOI: 10.1007/s11837-015-1771-3
2016 The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society
INTRODUCTION
Ceramic materials have been traditionally difficult to manufacture due to their unique combinations of attributes including high melting
temperature, high coefficient of thermal expansion,
low toughness and high hardness.13 On the other
hand, due to their outstanding performance in
various extreme environments, ceramic materials
hold promising potentials in applications such as
aerospace, automobiles and biomedicine. One area
in which ceramic materials have been extensively
used is dentistry, in which ceramics are used for
crowns, inlays, onlays, bridgeworks, dentures and
veneers due to their close mimicry of natural teeth
materials.46 In these applications, it is often
required that the ceramic structures possess satisfactory combinations of color, strength, opacity,
durability and accuracy, which poses a challenge
for the manufacturing processes. Current manufacturing techniques for many ceramic dental prostheses structures either lack sufficient quality control
due to the inability to deal with complex geometries,
or require extensive labor-intensive processes.79
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Process Development of Porcelain Ceramic Material with Binder Jetting Process for Dental
Applications
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Fig. 1. Dental porcelain powder.30 (a) SEM. (b) Particle size distribution after adding agent.
PR
V envelope
100
1
2
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50, 75
45, 60, 75
30, 45, 60
2, 6
Process Development of Porcelain Ceramic Material with Binder Jetting Process for Dental
Applications
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Levels
Temperature
Holding time
Heating rate
Fig. 5. Effect of factors and their interaction on green part accuracy in the Z direction.
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Process Development of Porcelain Ceramic Material with Binder Jetting Process for Dental
Applications
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Fig. 6. Effect of factors and their interaction on green part accuracy in X direction.
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Fig. 8. Effect of different factors and their interaction on green part strength.
Fig. 9. Linear shrinkage of structure at different temperatures. (a) 1 min. (b) 30 min.
Process Development of Porcelain Ceramic Material with Binder Jetting Process for Dental
Applications
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Fig. 10. Linear shrinkage of structures at different holding times. (a) 850C. (b) 900C.
adopted. On the other hand, when process robustness is needed, then a less efficient but less sensitive
process route may be adopted.
Effect of Heating Rate The heating rate experiments were performed at 900C for 1 min, and the
results of the linear shrinkage are shown in Fig. 11.
The linear shrinkage in all directions shows the
same trend as the heating rate changes from 100C/
h to 5000C/h. Generally, the Z direction has a
larger shrinkage than the lateral directions, and the
top portions also exhibit higher shrinkages than the
bottom portions. This might be partly contributed
by the specific layout of the sintering heat source
during the experiment.
For a very rapid heating rate (5000C/h), smaller
linear shrinkage could be expected due to the
insufficient sintering. On the other hand, at a very
slow heating rate (100C/h), the samples were in
fact subject to prolonged holding time at high
temperature ranges, which might effectively cause
gravity-induced distortion and over-sintering distortion as discussed above.
Porosity
As can be expected from traditional sintering
theories, with the increase of sintering temperature
or sintering times, the porosity of the final part
tends to reduce, as can be seen from Fig. 12. The
trend with porosity is also in general agreement
with the linear shrinkage observed at these conditions. Comparing Fig. 12a and b, it appears that the
lowest achievable porosity with the dental porcelain
is about 5.56.5%. Therefore, with higher sintering
temperature, the target porosities can be achieved
much faster, as illustrated by the case of 900C
sintering temperature (1 min). It must be noted that
the accuracy of the experimental setup for the
porosity measurement may be limited, and therefore might contribute to the increase of porosity at
higher temperature levels.
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Fig. 12. Post-sintering porosities of samples under different sintering conditions. (a) Different temperatures. (b) Different holding times.
drive two opposite binderpowder interaction mechanisms, it appears that optimum combinations can
be determined by carefully characterizing each
mechanism, which need to be further investigated
in future work.
CONCLUSION
In this study, a comprehensive experimental
investigation was carried out to evaluate the effect
of various printing parameters (binder amount,
drying power level, drying time, powder spread
speed) and sintering schedule (temperature, holding
time, heating rate) on the qualities of dental porcelain ceramic parts fabricated via the binder jetting
process. It was found that various printing parameters could significantly influence the geometrical
quality of the green parts, which could in turn affect
the geometrical accuracies of the final parts after
sintering. In addition, through the experimental
parameter search, optimized printing parameters
and sintering schedules that are suitable for different application cases were found for the dental
porcelain ceramic materials.
More importantly, this study provided insights
into various characteristics of the binder jetting
process. The rather complex process principles
driven by the binderpowder interaction and binder
curing have not been adequately studied, and in
order to successfully utilize this process for future
applications, extensive future work is needed. Also,
it becomes apparent that, with the current dental
porcelain material feedstock as well as the lack of
understanding of the process, it would be difficult
for the binder jetting to achieve the minimum
geometrical accuracy requirement of 0.1 mm for
dental prostheses applications.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors are grateful of the support from
Rapid Prototyping Center (RPC) at University of
Louisville and ExOne Co. Ltd.
Process Development of Porcelain Ceramic Material with Binder Jetting Process for Dental
Applications
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