Co-sintering of metal-ceramic composites with three-dimensional complex structures

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Metal-ceramic composites offer high flexibility and great potential for technical applications due to the possibility they offer to extend the property spectrum and to combine divergent properties such as local electrical conductivity and insulating capability. More practically, the brittle characteristics of ceramics can be positively influenced by grading or combining different ductile metal components to achieve high hardness, toughness and damage tolerance. Despite these benefits, such composites are until now mainly produced by combining different foils by means of tape casting. The production of components with complex structures in large volume is still challenging. In this project, the additive manufacturing of the complex composites using the Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) process will be carried out and systematically studied to face the challenge. The main objectives of the project are to understand the deformation, internal stress evolution and damage due to delamination in metal-ceramic composite components of arbitrary three-dimensional shape during the co-sintering process and to develop a reliable numerical method to predict and optimize the stress state in the composite already in the design phase. Distortion and delamination during sintering should be able to be avoided by reducing the critical shear and tensile stresses in the composite. With the developed numerical method, on the one hand, material- and process-specific optimization of the component design can be performed directly to avoid unexpected defects during production. On the other hand, the FFF process is expected to enable the production of complex shaped components with integrated intelligence, e.g., metallic components can be provided with a ceramic coating for wear protection.