Ceramic hybrid gravure printing

Lead Division
Ceramics, Division 8

Other Divisions Participating
Metrology, Division 5
Assembly & Packaging, Division 6
Metals, Division 7
Micro-sensors & actuators, Division 11

Summary
The objective of this cross-divisional project is the development of new µ-manufacturing processes for the fabrication of 2,5D and 3D multifunctional ceramic micro-parts. The proposed strategies consist of:

• Evaluating gravure printing (by multilayer rolling) on liquid nanoceramic feedstocks and benchmark with the tape imprinting for the manufacturing of 2D and 2.5D parts by co-firing process.
• Evaluation of the µ-PIM of nanoceramic feedstocks for the fabrication of similar 3D structures. The developed technologies will be evaluated for the fabrication of reference multi-materials µ-parts.

This project will support this vision by delivering a technology roadmap. The work will be done by 7 major 4M partners from 5 divisions (ceramic, metal, metrology, assembly, sensors) and will have an industrial focus for processes and end-user application (µ-power, µ-sensors, µ-membranes, µ-optical, µ-reactors,…), in fact an industrial advisory board will be involved as partner (Fotec, Battenfeld, Baikowski, Legrand, and Volvo). This industrial board will define and request the detail of potential RAS activities which could evolve out of this cross divisional project to validate potential industrial transfer of such new generation processes: In both cases, it is necessary to develop new types of nanopowders feedstocks suitable for those forming techniques. The use of such nanometric powders is justified by the necessity to replicated submicronic features. These new feedstocks which have to be developed will be made with nanometric powders, binders and the additives for further co-firing (low melting temperature for solid phase sintering). During this cross divisional project, a survey and state of the art of such nanopowders and new generation processes will be done with the input of industrial nanopowder and machine suppliers. For the three processes, basic experiment will be performed through round robin test. - Tape feedstocks type will be evaluated to further develop multilayer tapes fabrication - Printing feedstocks will be evaluated for the development of the multilayer printing, - µ-injection feedstock type will be evaluated for the co-injection processes The debinding and co-sintering of the parts will be analysed. Finally, some metrology control will compare and validate the processes.

Status of this cross-divisional project
This project is complete and the final report is here.