3D Printing Ceramic HEAT SHIELDS! Space Travel! Future!

hey it's Joel I'm in spring break capital of the world Grand Ledge Michigan at 3D serum sintel and the reason I'm here is to talk about Ceramics not just the porcelain that your grandmother has behind a glass case that you're not allowed to touch we're talking about alumina and zirconia-based Ceramics technical Ceramics 3D printable Ceramics the kind of ceramics that could go inside your body to help your bones heal or the kind of ceramics that can act as a heat shield for a spacecraft entering an atmosphere and that's important because this poor mini Jewel needs some protection so let's go inside and talk 3D printing ceramics [Music] I'm here with my friend David at 3D serum sinto hey man hey how are you Joel I'm good well I'm good my my little mini Joel he's been better so Ceramics I hear while like I said not for my grandma's porcelain in a glass case there's a technical ceramic category and it could help us keep mini Joel safe yes so while we're talking about heat shields or protective Ceramics they are not thermally conductive those types of Ceramics so you can use it as a protective device while you're re-entering the atmosphere while you're traveling at extreme speeds or while you're trying to protect something that's sensitive and needs thermal protection so that's one of the many applications for Ceramics well and these types of Ceramics are 3D printable yes so I have a machine right here next to us it's capable of printing these Ceramics can we go over the process of how this actually does it absolutely so what we'll talk about here is the 3D ceram c101 and this is our laboratory version so this what this does is dispenses a ceramic in a resin a photopolymer and then recoats it this will actually move forward put a thin coat down and then the laser up here will fire and cure a shape and then this small platform descends and descends and descends layer after layer similar to your traditional original SLA printing original right because now when we talk about lots of msla and DLP resin based 3D printers there's a 405 nanometer light and it emerges from the goo right and so this descends into the goo correct what's the reason for doing it that way so Ceramics are very heavy for one reason right so Ceramics are heavy and if you were to try to pull it up out of the goo it'd be fine for your small parts your laboratory samples maybe something as big as a tooth but when you talk about immense Parts like a heat shield or a larger ceramic piece they get so heavy that they would start to delaminate from the build plate also you would have an immense amount of supports that would be needed to hold it on that's that's another problem cutting supports off of ceramic leaves either a Vestige that's very hard to deal with or you would also potentially chip the ceramic if you cut it off after sintering and that's goes into the processing okay and you said the laser is up above so again gravity is assisting you here exactly and it's descending into the the liquid goo and then up above now this is a 405 nanometer laser right correct correct so it's it's firing with enough power to get through the technical ceramic and resin to build it on the build plate or on the previous layer right so like your mono SLA is also 405 nanometers but it doesn't fire at enough power through the screen to cure the ceramic Ah that's what I was wondering right because I know that you know consumer based 405 nanometer it's it's what a lot of the resins are out there that are designed for and so I was like well then how why is this this way it's like it's the power so that light Source isn't enough to cure a technical ceramic it has to be a laser light that's doing it yes you can do it with a high powered DLP as well but it would have to be a very high light intensity and the struggle with mono SLA is if you go up to that highlight intensity you start burning the screen and the screens don't last very long at all you don't want to do that no then if you've ever had to change the screen on your mono SLA it's no fun I have and it sucks it stinks now this has a an encoder yes that's a recorder I'm sorry so it coats and then it goes back and you get a nice even layer of ceramic and then it goes back and re-coats getting the precise layer thickness that you're looking for what is that thickness of 50 microns that's not a lot that's the half of a human hair that's really not a lot and the recoder like I I have a silicone spatula and I re-coat the pan of eggs as I'm you know scooping it but I would imagine at a technical level how does it maintain that 50 micron on height what what is what is in the recoder that's actually doing this right attached to this red thing there will be a metal blade and then you'll see this is actually moving on a block of granite like countertop Granite right so this doesn't move you see the laser is mounted to that same piece of granite oh my gosh so I didn't realize this is credit it doesn't move relative to this so that that laser is incredibly precisely located so you can print details down to 60 microns in layer thicknesses of 50 microns making incredibly detailed Parts uh so when you're building your gyroid when you're building something like a a dental piece or a bone you can have very fine meshes that the bone could then grow into when you're building a gyroid you can make a very fine gyroid structure wow I that's just neat I I love hearing that and it's it boggles my mind that this is like granite countertops when you think of granite you know yes so your granite countertop would be about that thick this is substantial industrial grade piece of equipment this is not a household piece of equipment these are expensive a little bit more expensive you're not serving breakfast on this granite the Precision that we can achieve with this is unparalleled in the industry so the other interesting thing with A continuous laser if you need a really precise line that you're drawing with that laser as opposed to a DLP is forming pixels right oh right so those pixels are little squares so as you're drawing a line with a screen you're actually forming a linear stepping of a bunch of little steps I I know you're going with this right so as you get bigger the pixels become more pronounced so if you were to make a bigger format you would just have a bunch of very very visible pixels oh that's not good because you can't you're not Machining Ceramics what you get is what you get right right so the continuous line The Continuous laser makes it clean continuously flowing shape that is then for very very small parts it's important because you can get very fine detail for large Parts you can get very consistent detail without the little notches again Ceramics don't like sharp edges they don't like corners and uh any little fine little notching is going to cause a surface issue that can lead to stress and fractures so now the print is done and the recoer has swiped all it needs to swipe and the part is in the goo what are the next steps right so it will then once it's completely finished it's printed all of its layers it'll emerge from this platform this platform here is our 100 by 100 appropriate for laboratory use some small production of small parts our medium-sized printer is 330 by 330 and then our large industrial or large part printer is 600 by 600 by 300 deep so it can make immense ceramic piece 60 centimeters by 60 centimeters by 30 centimeters that's possible is possible I printed them there's many applications for that uh both space and Industrial uses we're talking more and more about the chips act and making uh Wafers here in the United States and to do that we have to highly automate it to run those parts through a wafer manufacturing process it's incredibly high temperature so they the wafer will actually ride on what's called a wafer carrier that wafer carrier is made out of ceramic it's made out of alumina and that ceramic will then uh could pass heat through it it can pass cooling through it if we 3D print it there we go and it has to be large enough to carry of the boards yeah a big wafer a wafer ring is you know 500 millimeters in diameter 3D printing of these Ceramics allow for more functionality and more purpose whereas before it couldn't have done that right it was just a block or a series of structures that would then hold all of these Wafers now we can actually heat them and cool them and run them through faster and we can make automation of that process here in the United States at a much more efficient pace and when we talk about that size that's that's 600 millimeters by 600 by 300 tall when we talk about that size especially in something like heat shields you want less Parts you want Less open Parts because that that is where heat can get in right right yes when you're talking about a heat shield on a spaceship we're going to start talking commercial space right you're going to be going back and forth frequently I hope so yes so every joint in between each Shield causes drag and that drag is where the heat builds up that buildup of heat is where it becomes dangerous for little Joel yeah I mean you could see he re-entered yes inappropriately yes exactly mini Joel as you said he has burnt up a little bit because he tried re-entry without proper shielding so why don't we print a heat shield for mini Joel a heat shield for mini Jewel yes you want to start the print we just do this let's go try it yes yes David I hear the prince done it is done Joel okay so as we were talking we're gonna going to print a gyroid structure may I yes wow look at that I love the surface finish yes it is a smooth ceramic surface finish with a gyroid infill and like we mentioned the gyroid will both help to dissipate the heat through that longer travel and it will also provide some dead air space as an insulator I never thought that gyroid like the thing that I know is going to help us keep spacecraft safe it's just a fantastic thing we're at the point where we should start testing these 3D printed shapes for improving and making more commercially viable space travel that makes sense now this isn't the actual part this is an example to show the insides right because we've got more parts here yes so the actual finished part once printed and cleaned off would be like this the smooth outer surface ah I see and you want smooth because in heat shieldings less friction right a nice smooth outer surface with as few little gaps as possible and then uh the holes on the back this is actually for draining the uncured resin out but that then we also Envision those holes potentially being used as your assembly Aid or to bond to the actual fuselage that makes a lot of sense one or the other you might they're going to have to be there to empty the uncured resin you might as well use them to positively attach that's a great idea okay this is cleaned the print is done and cleaned and washed is that right correct what's the next step after this when a print is done okay so after you clean it and wash it now you have to de-bind or remove all of that resin from the printed part so what you're left with is just the ceramic that's inside of that polymer resin okay now you've got an example here yes so you de-bind it you put it in this Kiln here it runs under nitrogen it and it's also able to burn off all of that cured resin to the point where you have just a ceramic so this would be quite fragile I will be very careful under nitrogen why nitrogen so the inner Gas makes it so that you're not allowing oxygen in the oxygen can also cause popping like it oxygenates its sudden pop and the pop would cause a crappy very bad so we want to try to keep those popping and cracking to Absolute minimum nothing and then you'll see as you go from A to B to C this is quite a bit smaller all of the resin is actually gone at this point if it's white there's no more resin there's no more carbon it's just surround it removed it but in that process of heating it to remove it it shrunk it right so the little grains of ceramic that are stuck inside of the resin goo start coming closer and closer together until they're touching once they're touching then you've got a pretty nicely fused and fully sintered ceramic if you start bonding them all molecules or the grains together you start becoming crystalline and then it becomes too brittle and you don't want that so you want it just to be grains close together that's kind of the basics of ceramic so that's what we're seeing here so it's de-bound we have all the resin out this is a ceramic piece that is a ceramic piece and then what we're going to do is we're going to start that process of fusing the ceramic together called sintering and once we fully Center you will end up with a piece that looks like this and this piece as you'll see is quite a bit smaller it's even smaller right man yes and this one it would be a hard dense ceramic this one has been tested and fired so that one has got some marks on it some scars from actually being through a thermal test a torch test and now when we talk about sintering what temperature does this have to exist at and like what's the timetable for that right so to de-bind it's a very slow ramp up to about 600 c to burn off that resin that's this one right here deep binding right and you stay at 600c but that ramp has to be very slow because if you heat too fast again the ceramic can crack right so you want to get yes I'm sure if anyone has ever fired a piece of pottery and you fired it too fast it cracks and then ever all your work to make this beautiful shape is gone so we're shaping it and forming it we're cleaning it then we're de-binding it but how slow like like an hour no like four days oh really slow really slow really slow so you come up to temperature you maintain that temperature for hours to maybe a full day and then you come back down but you have to come back down slowly too exactly so you're so long time yeah your total process is four to five days to do the d-binding good to hear now this is sintered fully centered and what's the temperature here so to Center uh alumina we're going to go up into the 1600 1700 degrees C range so hot like the sun hot right so in this oven here or these smaller ovens here the 3D ceram Kiln here centering Kiln is going up to 1800 C is the max temperature that it can hit safely and we will take it to 1750 and hold it there overnight and then come back down and come in in the morning and we take our heat shield out so then this is a longer process because you're having to slowly do it to cook out the material this one though because it's pure Ceramics you don't have to take as long right and you're not you're not worried about that organic the the polymer popping and exploding and burning and you get carbon and you never know what you know you do know what's going to happen and you know that if you go too fast it will pop and Ceramics so you're putting this under 1700 C 1800c and it can hold and that's one of the reasons why I would imagine Ceramics are perfect for heat shielding because they can take the Heat and they're able to dissipate the heat right correct correct and they're they're a great insulator not only for heat but for electronics and other applications but also they're incredibly hard so that hardness is also good for durability for wear resistant scratch resistance if you land on another planet and you happen to get it all scratched up from the lunar regulate this surface is hard and durable against wear it's neat that we talked about heat shields in that they are durable and tough and hard because it could be that other world surfaces aren't very forgiving and then we also talked about them having to dissipate heat and we just we just happen to have something cool over here and there's a space shuttle right here because this part is for that correct yeah so this was one of the training parts and you know this was a collectible now because it's no longer in service um so this is part of basically these little black pieces let's go up here look at that so the the windshield right this is the what part of the black frame of the windshield right so this would have been on a training piece so in 1979 as Enterprise was being developed they had to try putting these heat shields on and anyone who's ever been to Kennedy and watched the the demo they talk about how the heat shields were as a problem and they were at least 45 years ago right this was the state-of-the-art technology in terms of how to manufacture a heat shield and how you would actually go about putting it on taking it off and reusing it because as you re-entered Earth's atmosphere in the in the shuttle program these would be like say ablated it would burn off and burn off right yeah and then you had to replace a large portion of these had to be every time every time every time and they were expensive okay so this is where it gets crazy this this piece right here is to scale and hundreds of these would be around the windshield right and the entire shuttle had 23 000 each 23 000. this is the original this is space shuttle this is 70s and 80s technology yes okay what was the cost for one of these something that size would have been around ten thousand dollars the bigger Shields would have been almost fifty thousand dollars and there's thousands of these on the spacecraft and so obviously having them a blade or burn off is is terrible because you want the whole point of spacecraft and space travel is reusable right reusable okay so this was as reusable as we could get in 1979 1980 technology yeah and so now the the task is how do we do commercial space right how do we have a vehicle go up to a hotel in space and come back let's say five times totally reusable five times there and back five times that means it has to go through the atmosphere going out and coming back five times but it's a very rough re-entry now when we talk about that though right we talk about this and the reason it's rough is because there are so many like all of these mating surfaces of a heat shield having to keep a spacecraft safe and there's hot spots that can develop and if one fault it's not optimal and so this is where additive Ceramics really empower the future of space travel right right so we look at not only gyroid shaping and forming and be able to create the shape that could potentially be have less drag but because we can also print larger parts we can now make bigger heat shield therefore less gaps less Fusion of those gaps together and less drag from having so many little tiny heat shields all over so this isn't this is not a heat shield here but this really illustrates the size of a 3D printable technical ceramic that could be used for heat shielding and it's not just being able to recreate this shape the whole point of additive is to be able to solve that problem in a better way with less material less money or to be able to make more of them right easily right and the other thing is to make it more reusable you know we would want to have a hard durable outer skin um whereas this the soft foam the Lumina silica base of uh original Shield was very fragile and any little micrometeor or any little piece of debris during exit or launch would hit that and it would potentially damage the shield and that can be quite dangerous on re-entry people don't a lot of times realize that when we talk about the future of space travel it's not just being able to create reusable vehicles from here on planet Earth we have to be able to service those vehicles not just within atmosphere but potentially on other worlds and this is how we get there right so imagine 3D printing your heat shield where your repair out of lunar regulate you know take that material put it in the resin you know prints have a little printing Farm there and go to regular Martian soil the possibilities are right we could potentially do that in space as a re-entry service plan you know you come in and before you at re-enter the Earth's atmosphere you get your spaceship checked out you know and replace a couple tiles check the tire pressure get clean the windshield maybe an oil change you never know yeah there'll be a little dude there I think it's safe for your travel right yeah there you go it's so fun to think about now it's time to explore the real reason why I'm here at 3D serum Cento and that's to keep mini Joel Safe in His spacecraft on re-entry to Mother Earth correct how did this happen this happened [Music] David we're set up here we are now this metal is what aluminum oh okay basic aluminum standard grade so a lot of aircraft are aluminum skin so that's what we figured we would demonstrate and then uh yeah we'll try it with just a torch test it's just a torch this is bare aluminum spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere with mini Joel as a pilot right and absolutely no assistance from any kind of thermal protection system whatsoever this is awesome ready let's see I think so just uh we're entering the atmosphere and as you see without any heat protection the aluminum starts to fail and very quickly it'll fail and burn through and poor little Jewel suddenly untouched [Music] so this is why aluminum spacecraft should not enter an atmosphere without some form of heat shielding exactly because the amount of drag on the outside of the fuselage would heat up so much that it would just burn off the aluminum and pour little mini Joel on the inside but now though with Ceramics we have the ability to protect not just the aluminum spacecraft but the mini Joel inside so why don't we get set up and why don't we test that absolutely next up heat shields keep it on the heat shield you'll see the heat shield will start to get hot it'll start to get red hot but little Joel is still fine and route of atmosphere I can hold it I could freaking hold it mini Joel was it's fine right exactly so the heat shield totally protects it dissipates the heat the spaceship is fine mini Joel's fine re-entry happened everyone's safe and back at home and and this is thanks to not just Ceramics but 3D printed Ceramics right that gyroid shape that we talked about the air dissipation on the inside the ability to have a nice hard smooth outer surface all those things only possible with 3D printed ceramic listen you know what we're we've proven that this works and there's a lot of really cool technical details about the 3D printed ceramics that 3D serum sinto does and so I want you to look to the audience and tell them where they can go to find out more information so please go to www.3dsoram.com to get more information about the printers the materials and what the 3D printing of Ceramics can do and we'll put a specific Link in the description that'll take you to a specific spot to kind of give you some more information stuff if you made this fire awesome don't forget to hug each other more fight for a cause you believe in enter all the atmospheres with 3D printed Ceramics let's go in and as always high five [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign

Channel: 3D Printing Nerd

Views: 67,041

Keywords: 3d printing nerd, joel telling, joeltelling, 3d printing, 3dpn

Id: 39f6e_OuFHU

Length: 25min 41sec (1541 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2023