We had a look at D3 Additive Manufacturing’s latest ceramic 3D printer.
The German company specializes in ceramic 3D printing, and that makes them one of the few that do. Ceramics are a powerful material due to their extreme rigidity and thermal resistance, but there aren’t many companies making 3D printers for that material.
D3-AM uses an inkjet approach for 3D printing, where tiny particles are deposited selectively on the print surface. Their process is called Micro Particle Jetting, or MPJ.
That’s not a totally unique process, but what is unique is that the droplets are actually plain water mixed with the ceramic particles.
As the toolhead travels across the print surface, it selectively deposits droplets. Then, each layer is dried before moving on to the next layer. Support material is possible, and is a different material delivered from a separate toolhead.
So far this sounds pretty straightforward, but then the advantages of MPJ appear.
After printing, objects made with a binder jet process must undergo two post-processing steps: debinding and sintering. Debinding is a chemical and/or thermal process to remove the binding agent that held the particles together. Sintering, done later, fuses the ceramic particles together.
MPJ differs in that there is no binder! The water has already been dried out, and any residual water boils away during sintering. There is no need for a debinding step, simplifying the process considerably.
The ceramic is provided in a water-based solution, eliminating the need for powders entirely. This makes MPJ a bit safer and easier to handle.
In addition, water is by definition environmentally friendly, and isn’t a challenging chemical to deal with, as can be the binding agents.
Another advantage to MPJ is that it can accommodate larger ceramic particle sizes, up to 0.062mm in diameter. This is quite a bit larger than you might see on some competing ceramic systems, and should help make the parts as rigid as possible.
It also allows for a wider range of possible ceramic materials. D3-AM explains:
“[There are] no limits in material selection, from fine to coarse size particles, from Al2O3 and SiC to RBSIC.”
The MPJ process also ensures the resulting parts are very high density and basically pure ceramic.
There’s another advantage shown here. What looks like a large 3D printed “3” is exactly what it is. Unfortunately, I didn’t provide a banana for scale, but it is a fairly hefty “3”.
The point here is that the 3 is quite thick, and that’s something you cannot achieve with the binder jet processes: binder can only be removed if it’s relatively close to the surface of the object. In other words, you typically cannot 3D print larger ceramic objects with most ceramic 3D print processes.
But you can with MPJ.
D3-AM’s latest 3D printer, the LAB II, uses MPJ in a rather large build volume of 400 x 480 x 160 mm. As you can see at the top, it’s possible to 3D print a large number of parts in a single job on this device.
D3-AM seems to have a very compelling proposition for those interested in 3D printed ceramic production.
Via D3-AM
