[Resume] 3-D-Printed Ceramics

Resume

Magazine         : MIT Technology Review Vol.119 No.3 May/June 2016

Title                 : 3-D-Printed Ceramics

            Ceramics are some of the hardest materials on earth. They can withstand extreme temperatures, and some are impervious to friction, scratching, and other mechanical stresses that wear out metal and plastic.

Chemists at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California, may have gotten around that problem by developing ceramics that can be made in a 3-D printer. The result: ultrastrong objects that are impossible to make using conventional methods.

Ceramics are used today in brake pads, the housing of microelectronics, and thermal shielding tiles (like the ones on spacecraft). Now the scientists at HRL are trying to substantially expand the applications. If parts for aircraft engines were made of ceramic, for example, the engines could run at a higher temperature, increasing their efficiency.

HRL’s trick is to formulate special resins that can be used as the ink in a printer. They are made out of polymers but carry in their molecular structure silicon and other elements found in ceramics. These resins are loaded into 3-D printers to make parts with baroque shapes, such as corkscrews and sheets of intricate lattices. Then those parts go into a furnace to bake out the organic polymer components, leaving behind ceramic material.

One approach is to design new kinds of pre-ceramic polymers that have fibers embedded in them to stop cracks from spreading. Ceramics are brittle and can fail catastrophically with one crack. It wouldn’t do if a minuscule defect caused a clever new part to shatter.

1. Impervious : kedap air

2. Friction : pergeseran

3. Brake : mengerem

4. Thermal : panas

5. Resins : damar

6. Carry : membawa

7. Baroque :  suatu aliran seni

8. Corkscrews : pembuka botol

9. Intricate : berbelit-belit

10. Lattices : kisi

11. Furnace : perapian

12. Fibers : serat

13. Embedded : tertannam

14. Brittle : rapuh

15. Catastrophically : bencana

16. Minuscule : amat kecil

17. Shatter : pecah

18. Aircraft : pesawat terbang

19. Bake : membakar

20. Scratching : goresan