Formnext is considered one of the largest venues in the field of additive manufacturing. Many new and popular technologies in the industry will be on display at the trade fair, including 3D printers, 3D materials and 3D scanners.
Frankfurt am Main
November 19, 2024 - November 22, 2024
Due to their properties - high youngs modulus, high hardness and high strength - ceramic materials are known to be suitable for protective equipment and armor in the defense and security sector. Fraunhofer IKTS offers several variants of additive shaping processes known as CerAMfacturing, in which complex components can be produced in small or medium quantities by hybridizing materials or processes. Of particular interest are lightweight equipment of high hardness made of SiC and B4C for passive body armor. Additive Manufacturing methods for the production of large-volume components, such as powder-bed-based binder jetting (BJT) and material-extruding fused filament fabrication (FFF), are used for this purpose. Diamond/SiC composites, which are currently the main focus of todays investigations, offer particularly good ballistic protection.
The demand-oriented care of patients with a view to a long and active life is closely linked to the individualization of implants. Criteria such as the greatest possible fit for the individual bone, single-piece production in facial surgery, and cases in which the bone substance no longer allows a standard revision implant, lead to solutions for patient-specific implants in combination with individual 3D surgical planning.
Customized implants are a great source of hope, especially for small joints, where there are hardly any standard implants and joint stiffening is the standard therapy. Joint stiffening leads to a loss of quality of life. For silicon nitride implants, IKTS uses high-resolution 3D printing technologies such as vat photopolymerization (VPP). This allows delicate structures and patterning to be implemented with a high degree of accuracy. A prerequisite for this is silicon nitride suspensions developed at Fraunhofer IKTS, which make printing of biocompatible silicon nitride quality possible in the first place.
Harsh environmental conditions with high thermal, chemical and/or mechanical stresses are a challenge in almost all areas of industry. In these cases, highly integrated sensor systems with metallic or polymeric components reach their limits and make real-time data acquisition difficult. Functionalized 3D ceramic components, on the other hand, meet the requirements in terms of robustness, miniaturization and reliability. Thanks to the targeted selection of materials and the combination of additive manufacturing and thick-film technology, they combine advantages such as chemical and thermal resistance, high hardness, low density or certain biological properties with highly complex geometries for the first time.
Based on the combination of ceramic vat photopolymerization (CerAM VPP) and freeze foaming, precisely fitting, mechanically stable bone replacement materials have been developed for use as load-bearing jawbones. As a result of animal testing in the lower jaw, a generic hybrid implant has now been developed as a demonstrator for the pig jaw.
Powder Bed Fusion - Laser Beam (PBF-LB) is an established AM process in the field of plastic and metal printing. In PBF-LB, materials are melted as a powder by a laser in a powder bed. By adapting the process, Fraunhofer IKTS has succeeded in making the shaping process usable for the production of silicon-filtered silicon carbide ceramics (SiSiC). PBF-LB has not yet found any technical application for the production of silicon carbide ceramics (SiC), as SiC cannot be melted and forms passivating oxide layers at high temperatures. Therefore, SiC powders were developed which have a high flowability due to their roundness and are ideally suited for powder bed-based manufacturing processes. The SiC powders were then coated with a special Novolak. This resin can be melted thermoplastically and can also be processed into a duromer. The starting material can be processed using a PBF-LB system. After additive shaping, the components produced in this way can be converted into silicon carbide components with properties that correspond to those of conventionally shaped components by means of conventional pyrolysis and siliconization.
In order to meet the constantly growing demand for more efficient and cost-effective components in the aerospace sector, the focus is increasingly being placed on the additive manufacturing of complex functionalized components made of high-performance materials. With the Multi Material Jetting technology at Fraunhofer IKTS, a large number of different combinations of properties can be realized in a single component in a single production step. For example, electrically functional, all-ceramic multi-material components can be additively manufactured to improve accessibility for aerospace applications. These include, for example, various heating and ignition elements.
The demand for complex, functionalized components based on technical ceramics and/or metals is constantly increasing both in the field of research and development and increasingly in industry. One interesting field of application is the integration of heating elements in components of all kinds. Additive manufacturing, and in particular the multi-material jetting process, offers a wide range of new possibilities here.
The possibility of the defined placement of conductor paths at the desired heat hotspots and the great geometric freedom allows the resistances to be changed quickly and thus easy adaptation to the electrical connection options of the heating elements. Through the combination of integrated cooling channels and active cooling, areas with high temperatures of up to 1000 °C can be selectively shielded from the rest of the component.
The selective integration of heating elements in the necessary areas means that the required power can be reduced many times over. The entire component no longer needs to be heated and partially cooled again with additional energy. By designing components accordingly, multifunctional components can be realized that are significantly more efficient and at the same time require less power for operation.
Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems IKTS