Development of an extrusion-based multimaterial (metal/ceramic) additive manufacturing technology for electrical machine components

The geometry of electrical machine components has been constrained due to limitations of conventional manufacturing techniques, while one possible solution to this issue is to resort to additive manufacturing. This project aims to develop metal and ceramic filaments for fused filament fabrication (FFF), along with the related printing and post-processing techniques for the purpose of electrical machines. The doctoral program will start with determining the filament composition, which consists of metal/ceramic particles, polymeric binders and additives, depending on the application objective. Furthermore, the fabrication process will be investigated to convert feedstock to qualified composite filaments, where the key point is to guarantee material homogeneity, accuracy and filament ductility. As the next step, the printability of the fabricated filaments will be evaluated on commercial 3D printers and the print process optimized. Later, debinding and sintering will be studied together with the department of Material Engineering of the KU Leuven. The adoption of FFF avoids high hardware cost of other 3D printing technologies for metal material such as power bed fusion. The final fabricated filament is dedicated to being compatible on open source FFF printer and showing acceptable quality as well as suitable electromagnetic performance with complex part design.