Curing Behavior of Ceramic Resin for Stereolithography

Ceramic green bodies have been created with stereolithography methods by using ultraviolet curable suspension of ceramic powders, a "ceramic resin", on a Stereolithography Apparatus (SLA). A minivat system with mini-recoater blade was designed to run small batch experiments on an SLA-250/40 machine. With the ceramic resins developed from hydroxyapatite for biomedical application and from alumina and silica for making metal casting molds, ceramic green bodies were built. Diagnostic parts of these ceramic resins were made with the Accumax diagnostic kit (3D Systems) and the curing parameters determined. The effect ofshrinkage stress and scattering will be discussed.