Additive Manufacturing of SiC Ceramics with Complicated Shapes Using the FDM Type 3D-Printer

Silicon carbide (SiC) ceramics have excellent properties and widely used for high temperature applications. So far, joining techniques have been applied to fabricate large SiC ceramics with complicated shapes. In this work, the additive manufacturing (AM) technique was examined to fabricated SiC ceramics with complicated hollow structures using the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) type 3D-printer. To mold the hollow structure for the applications such as heat exchangers, the “support-less” condition must be achieved. Thus, extruded SiC-phenol resin compounds must be cured immediately after molding to keep the molded shapes. To increase the thermal conductivity of the SiC compounds, the combinations of commercial SiC powders with different average diameters were examined for increasing the volume fraction of SiC particles to the phenol resin. SiC compounds with optimized rheological properties for the modified FDM-type 3D-printer were successfully obtained.