A comprehensive review on the tape casting of ceramic nanocomposite

The tape casting is a low-cost technique which is used for the processing of ceramics, ceramic composites to make thick films for various applications such as capacitors, resistors, multilayer varistors, inductors. The green tapes are prepared by casting aqueous or organic solvent-based slip (powdered raw material suspended in a liquid) containing the ceramic powders, solvents, binders, plasticizers, surfactants, dispersants etc. to form the thick films/ tapes [1, 2]. In this paper, slurry preparations with different solvents (aqueous and non-aqueous) to make thick films of ceramic materials are elucidated. Preparation of slurry is pretty complex, therefore understanding the slurry physical properties like Zeta potential, rheology, viscosity as well as solid loading of slurry is important to achieve good quality films/tapes [1, 3-7]. The tape is very sensitive to some parameters during drying like humidity, drying rate, thickness of the film, compositions so on and so forth. Aqueous system has a number of advantages like non-toxicity, incombustibility and low cost over organic solvent-based system. However, an aqueous suspension has some disadvantages of high evaporation latent heat and inferior drying characteristics, and problems associated with the quality of the tape also arises [1-4]. The quality of the film is dependent upon the ratio of the additives (like binder, plasticizer), amount of solvent and particle size and size distributions of the materials. Understanding of all these parameters are required which helped in better design of experiments in order to improve the properties of the devices [2, 8, 9, 10]. In this review, we also cover the recent development of processing of various materials by tape casting and critically comments on industrial practises for diverse applications.