Processing of piezocomposites by fused deposition technique

The Fused Deposition technique was used to form piezoelectric ceramic-polymer composites with various architectures. The Fused Deposition technique is a solid freeform fabrication (SFF) process where a 3-D object is built from a 1.75 mm diameter filament fed into a heated extruder head capable of moving in the X-Y direction. The head extrudes fine beads (roads) of material onto a fixtureless platform capable of moving in the Z-direction. In this work, two different manufacturing routes, fused deposition modeling (FDM/sup TM/) and fused deposition of ceramics (FDC), were use to process lead-zirconate-titanate (PZT) ceramic/polymer composites. In the FDM/sup TM/ method, polymer molds with various connectivities were fabricated. Molds were infiltrated with a PZT slurry and dried. For the FDC method, PZT-binder filaments with 50-55 volume % solids loading were extruded and then used as a feed material to fabricate green ceramic structures. The structures were subjected to a binder burn out cycle and sintered. The composite fabrication was completed by embedding the sintered structures in an epoxy polymer. Composites were cut, polished, electroded and poled for electromechanical characterization. Composites with features as fine as 50 /spl mu/m were fabricated using these methods. Several novel composites with structures which can not be formed by standard methods will be shown and the electromechanical properties will be presented.