Rapid prototyping of functional ceramic composites

Laminated object manufacturing (LOM{reg_sign}) is one of several manufacturing systems developed recently to produce a solid part directly from a 3D CAD drawing, without the use of hard tooling or dies. These systems begin with a conventional 3-D CAD file--solid model or wire-form model--that is converted to a de facto standard format for flexible manufacturing (.STL file) and sliced into thin cross sections by a separate computer program. These slices are then used to control the equipment that produces the component slice-by-slice. This paper describes an application of the CerLOM approach to produce multilayered composites of ZrO{sub 2} and Al{sub 2}O{sub 3}. The choice of materials is based on previous studies that showed that a beneficial increase in toughness can be achieved with multilayered microstructures in this system. The toughness increase is due to martensitic transformation in the ZrO{sub 2}phase. Because the CerLOM process produces the component directly from a CAD file without tooling, dies or molds, the production is rapid and cost effective. Components of complex shape can be fabricated readily, and design changes can be made easily.