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As humanity contemplates manned missions to Mars, strategies need to be developed for the design and operation of hospitable environments to safely work in space for years. The supply of spare parts for repair and replacement of lost equipment will be one key need, but in-space manufacturing remains the only option for a timely supply. With high flexibility in design and the ability to manufacture ready-to-use components directly from a computeraided model, additive manufacturing (AM) technologies appear extremely attractive. For the manufacturing of metal parts, laser-beam melting is the most widely used AM process. However, the handling of metal powders in the absence of gravity is one prerequisite for its successful application in space. A gas flow throughout the powder bed is successfully applied to compensate for missing gravitational forces in microgravity experiments. This so-called gas-flow-assisted powder deposition is based on a porous Building platform acting as a filter for the fixation of metal particles in a gas flow driven by a pressure difference maintained by a vacuum pump.
Up to now, there exists a lack of methods for the additive manufacturing of voluminous ceramic parts with properties comparable to those of conventionally manufactured ones. A high density after sintering is needed to reach the superior properties of ceramic materials. We have developed a new additive manufacturing method, Laser-Induced Slip casting (LIS), to generate ceramic green bodies with high particle packing density and with virtually no restriction in the particle size of the feedstock, especially in terms of small particles. This is achieved by laser-induced local drying of slurries, with the process resembling many features of the well-established stereolithography, but without the excessive use of polymeric material. Thus, unlike the stereolithography process, the resulting green bodies can be processed like traditionally produced ceramic parts. This method allows large and dense additive-manufactured parts to be obtained from conventional water-based ceramic slurries. As an example, we will demonstrate the application of this novel technique with Si3N4.
Dense ZnO films with a strong c‐axis texture have been deposited on transparent conductive oxide glass, glass, and Si wafers, respectively, with a two‐step pressureless wet chemical method using zinc acetate dihydrate as Zn‐precursor. The crystallographic structure of the films has been studied with XRD and scanning electron microscopy. Optical measurements reveal a high transparency of the ZnO films with a thickness of up to 10 μm. This new cost‐effective route for ZnO film deposition does not require expensive sophisticated equipment and is easily upscaled.
Additive manufacturing of alkali-activated materials currently attracts a lot of attention, because of the possibility to produce customized high-performance elements for a range of applications, potentially being more resource-efficient than conventionally produced parts. Here, we describe a new additive manufacturing process for alkali-activated materials that is based on selective laser-heating of lithium aluminate/microsilica slurries. The new process-material combination allows to manufacture elements with complex geometries at high building rates and high accuracy. The process is versatile and transferrable to structures of sizes differing by orders of magnitude. The mechanical strength of the obtained materials was in the range of values reported for conventional metakaolin-based geopolymers, and superior to what has been hitherto reported for alkali-activated materials produced by additive manufacturing. This mechanical performance was obtained despite the fact that the degree of reaction of the lithium aluminate and the microsilica was low, suggesting that significant reactions took place only at the surface of the microsilica particles.