Ceramics are found in products that touch just about everybody's life. They're in household appliances, automobiles, airplanes, computers and medical equipment and have a variety of functions ranging from structural to electrical to optical. Bob Eagan, Sandia's vice president for Physical Sciences and Components, says robocasting may change the future of ceramics manufacturing. Also, it may result in cheaper and faster fabrication of complex parts. Because the new method allows a dense ceramic part to be free-formed, dried, and baked in less than 24 hours, it is perfect for rapid prototyping.
Engineers can quickly change a design of a part and physically see if it works.
More traditional ceramic fabrication methods may take weeks to go from a design to an actual part. For example, the standard dry pressing method requires ceramic powder to be compacted into a solid hunk of material, a billet. To fabricate a complicated part, the billet must be sculpted into the final shape with costly machining. Other ceramic processing techniques, such as slip casting, gel casting, and injection molding, can yield complicated ceramic parts but require the design and manufacture of molds prior to fabrication. Besides prototyping, Cesarano sees the new method also being used in the actual manufacturing of ceramics.