Thermal debinding for stereolithography additive manufacturing of advanced ceramic parts: A comprehensive review

Abstract

Stereolithography additive manufacturing (SLAM) has exhibited great potential for fabricating advanced ceramic objects with geometrically complicated structures for use in diverse fields owing to its excellent feature resolution and high surface quality. However, it is difficult to fabricate advanced ceramic parts with desired performance for structural and functional applications using this technology, because numerous binders used in ceramic SLAM must be removed by thermal debinding (TD), resulting in various defects generation and long processing period. In this review, we first focus on the raw materials used to create photocurable ceramic suspensions that greatly affect the TD process. We then highlight three important issues related to the TD process: TD mechanism, characterization method, and TD procedure design. Besides, this review summarizes the basis and principles for designing reasonable TD profiles for various practical applications. Finally, this review presents the challenges and future perspective for TD of ceramic SLAM. This review provides an overview of the crucial TD process for advanced ceramic components fabricated using SLAM approach, thus providing valuable reference information and helping readers grasp the theoretical foundation for the targeted design of TD schemes to stimulate the development of advanced ceramic parts manufactured by SLAM in both academia and industry.

Keywords

• Additive manufacturing
• Stereolithography
• Advanced ceramics
• Thermal debinding
• Defect generation