Damage-tolerant 3D-printed ceramics via conformal coating

Seyed Mohammad Sajadi; Lívia Vásárhelyi; Reza Mousavi; Amir Hossein Rahmati; Zoltán Kónya; Ákos Kukovecz; Taib Arif; Tobin Filleter; Robert Vajtai; Peter Boul; Zhenqian Pang; Teng Li; Chandra Sekhar Tiwary; Muhammad M Rahman; Pulickel M Ajayan

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abc5028

Damage-tolerant 3D-printed ceramics via conformal coating

Sci Adv. 2021 Jul 7;7(28):eabc5028. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abc5028. Print 2021 Jul.

Authors

Seyed Mohammad Sajadi¹, Lívia Vásárhelyi², Reza Mousavi³, Amir Hossein Rahmati⁴, Zoltán Kónya^{5

6}, Ákos Kukovecz², Taib Arif⁷, Tobin Filleter⁷, Robert Vajtai^{1

2}, Peter Boul⁸, Zhenqian Pang⁹, Teng Li¹⁰, Chandra Sekhar Tiwary¹¹, Muhammad M Rahman¹², Pulickel M Ajayan¹²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
² Interdisciplinary Excellence Centre, Department of Applied and Environmental Chemistry, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
³ ANSYS Inc., Houston, TX 77094, USA.
⁴ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, USA.
⁵ Interdisciplinary Excellence Centre, Department of Applied and Environmental Chemistry, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary. konya@chem.u-szeged.hu lit@umd.edu chandra.tiwary@metal.iitkgp.ac.in mr64@rice.edu ajayan@rice.edu.
⁶ MTA-SZTE Reaction Kinetics and Surface Chemistry Research Group, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
⁷ Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
⁸ Aramco Americas, Houston, TX 77002, USA.
⁹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
¹⁰ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. konya@chem.u-szeged.hu lit@umd.edu chandra.tiwary@metal.iitkgp.ac.in mr64@rice.edu ajayan@rice.edu.
¹¹ Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. konya@chem.u-szeged.hu lit@umd.edu chandra.tiwary@metal.iitkgp.ac.in mr64@rice.edu ajayan@rice.edu.
¹² Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA. konya@chem.u-szeged.hu lit@umd.edu chandra.tiwary@metal.iitkgp.ac.in mr64@rice.edu ajayan@rice.edu.

Abstract

Ceramic materials, despite their high strength and modulus, are limited in many structural applications due to inherent brittleness and low toughness. Nevertheless, ceramic-based structures, in nature, overcome this limitation using bottom-up complex hierarchical assembly of hard ceramic and soft polymer, where ceramics are packaged with tiny fraction of polymers in an internalized fashion. Here, we propose a far simpler approach of entirely externalizing the soft phase via conformal polymer coating over architected ceramic structures, leading to damage tolerance. Architected structures are printed using silica-filled preceramic polymer, pyrolyzed to stabilize the ceramic scaffolds, and then dip-coated conformally with a thin, flexible epoxy polymer. The polymer-coated architected structures show multifold improvement in compressive strength and toughness while resisting catastrophic failure through a considerable delay of the damage propagation. This surface modification approach allows a simple strategy to build complex ceramic parts that are far more damage-tolerant than their traditional counterparts.

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