Date of Award

2024-05-01

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Mechanical Engineering

Advisor(s)

David Espalin

Abstract

Finding an adequate ceramic formulation for material extrusion is a time-consuming process. The necessary equipment may be unavailable to perform the desired test. This study demonstrated an alternative to observe a material after extrusion to understand its drying process. This study focused on 55 solid loading volume percent and a 39 solid loading volume percent, each with two different binder treatments focusing on fresh same day made binder, a 30 day old, aged binder and lastly an artificial binder obtained by a fuming process. Firstly, a formulation was created and loaded onto a pressure-based syringe to be extruded with a custom-made ceramic extrusion printer. Six cylindrical samples with a 12.7 mm diameter were printed to analyze. A CMOS camera was required to capture images though time and analyze with a custom python script to determine drying rate per formulation. The system captured images periodically every 60 seconds through 45 minutes. The images were then transferred to the processing software where the surface wet area was calculated in pixel squared to determine the surface drying rate percentage. The individual inspection of each frame was necessary to determine the drying behavior as it is important to consider the drying rate of the ceramic paste as it may lead to deformation and defects from drying to be detected before the printing process. By calculating the area per frame, it was possible to analyze the behavior of the samples through time to determine a drying factor of 47.5% and 51.3% reduction for 39vol% with versus 55vol% respectively with the only change in formulation being the binder treatment. The test allowed to observe samples lifting from printing substrate and when no lifting occurred the samples showed significant cracking. Additionally, the test identified the 55vol% formulation with an artificial binder performed better as it had the least leveling after extruding.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

79 p.

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Abigail Ortega

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