| This research applied a combination of rapid prototyping techniques and ceramic gelcasting processes in the design and manufacturing of advanced structural ceramic components that cannot be fabricated by other shape-forming processes. An Assembly Mold SDM process, a derivative process of Shape Deposition Manufacturing, was adopted along with modified gelcasting with great success. The fabricated gas turbine rotors, inlet nozzles, and mesoscale burner arrays have demonstrated superior shape accuracy, mechanical strength, and surface smoothness with a feature size of 200 mum. The design concepts and functionalities of the ceramic devices were verified with performance tests.; The shape complexity and surface quality of ceramic parts have been further improved by the use of a mold assembly made of a low melting temperature metal alloy. The introduction of metal alloy required modifications in the mold design, machining procedure, and ceramic processing. A complete shape forming process (from slurry to final parts) was developed for the low melting temperature metal alloy. In addition, the choice of ceramic material now includes SiC, which is critical to the development of micro heat exchangers. Forty-channel, high-aspect-ratio structured SiC heat exchangers were fabricated, and the thermal conductivity value of SiC was found to be comparable to that of steel. The catalyst deposition and ceramic precursor impregnation processes were proposed to enable use of the SiC heat exchangers as micro reactors.; Micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS)-related techniques such as SU-8 deep photolithography and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) soft lithography were combined with gelcasting to make micro patterns on structural ceramics. A feature size of 125 mum and aspect ratio of 8 have been achieved in the preliminary experiments.; Based on the fabricated ceramic devices, a graphical method to characterize the shape attributes of complex-shaped components was proposed and used to compare the difficulty in manufacturing. Other material properties such as microstructure, chemical composition, and surface roughness were examined with appropriate techniques during the development of these ceramic devices. The results from the material characterization provided valuable information on the flaws in the processes and guidelines for future improvements. |
