Effect of porosity on the mechanical properties of zirconia based ceramics obtained via 3D printing

Engineering ceramics present a unique combination of mechanical, thermal and chemical properties becoming increasingly important in the nowadays-industrial landscape. Unlike other engineering ceramic materials, zirconia oxide displays very high resistance to crack propagation and thermal expansion which lead to be a candidate material for a wide range of applications such as biomedical, thermal barrier coatings and electrolytes for solid oxide fuel cell. However, manufacturing of ceramic components has still major limitation in production of highly complex 3D shapes, micro features or structures with tailored porosity. Nowadays, new technologies enable adding up complex three-dimensional structures layer by layer. Powder based rapid prototyping technique is such a versatile method with unique flexibility in material and geometry. In this work, microstructural 3Y-ZrO2 based ceramic materials were design and produced by Rapid Prototyping with the main goal to study the influence of printing geometries on the microstructure and mechanical properties from macro-to microscopic length scale