Influence of particle shape in the additive manufacturing process for ceramics

Abstract Additive manufacturing (AM) of ceramics through a vat photopolymerization (VP) process is a promising technique due to the high intrinsic resolution and the evanescence of stresses introduced during the layerwise additive manufacturing process. Compared to the regular vat photopolymerization process, the addition of ceramic powder increases physical complexity. Hence, large scale adoption and optimization of AM for ceramics requires a thorough understanding of the underlying physics. This work focuses on the light scattering introduced through a complex interplay between optical properties of different constituents and its effect on the photopolymerization. The effect of the shape of the ceramic particle is investigated for isolated and multiple particle cases using a parametric analysis with regular convex polygons. Although the analysis of two-dimensional isolated particle shapes indicates a preference for one shape over the other, this difference vanishes in a multiple-scattering situation. A three-dimensional analysis furthermore shows that a two-dimensional approximation of the three-dimensional scattering problem is relevant and can be used to further the process understanding of ceramic VP.