Aerospace Engineering Commons^™

Improved Additive Manufacturing Of Silicon Carbide Parts Via Pressureless Electric Field-Assisted Sintering, Adam Bratten, Ruoyu Chen, Joshua Rittenhouse, Ming-Chuan Leu, Haiming Wen

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

High solids loading silicon carbide (SiC)-based aqueous slurries containing only.5 wt. % organic additives were utilized to create specimens of various geometries via an extrusion-based additive manufacturing (AM) technique. Pressure less electric field-assisted sintering was performed to densify each specimen without deformation. The combination of these techniques produced parts with >98% relative density despite containing only 5 wt.% oxide sintering additives. After sintering, specimens contained only the α-SiC and yttrium aluminum perovskite phases. This suggests the evolution of a nonequilibrium yttrium aluminate phase, as well as transformation from β-SiC to α-SiC. The fabrication method presented in this work has advantages …