While Additive Manufacturing (AM)-technologies are already state-of-the-art in plastics processing or metalworking, the ceramic industry has been reluctant to implement this kind of technology due to insufficient quality of the parts produced by this means. Additive manufactured ceramics used to lack essential material properties such as density or strength, which hindered the application of such parts as technical ceramics.In this paper a new AM-technology, the Lithography-based Ceramic Manufacturing (LCM)-process, is presented. This technique is based on the selective curing of a photosensitive slurry by a mask exposure process. During the structuring, a photopolymer matrix is generated, which temporarily acts as scaffold and binder for the ceramic particles and is later on removed at elevated temperatures. Due to this approach, this novel technique achieves high green densities and thus, enables the production of strong, dense and accurate ceramic parts without any geometrical limitations. The parts produced using this technology have very similar mechanical properties as classical formed ceramic parts; for alumina a theoretical density of over 99.3 % and four-point bending strength of over 430 MPa has already been realized. These characteristics render the LCM-process an innovative and capable production method, especially in the case of complex shaped structures, customized parts or small series production.
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