Additively Manufactured Ceramic Lattice Structures: Fabrication, Challenges, and Applications

Ceramic materials are used in the manufacturing of medical devices, aircraft components, and mould casting because of their high melting, excellent compression strength, and high heat resistance. Ceramics are very difficult to manufacture by conventional techniques because of their hardness and brittleness, manufacturing difficulty also makes it costly, and fabrication of ceramic lattice structures (CLSs) is even more difficult, but their extraordinary properties are attracting researchers to do work in this field. CLS reduces the mass of the manufactured item which optimizes the materials and cost for the required functionality. CLS fabrication by additive manufacturing (AM) has too many challenges, i.e. mixing of ceramic oxide powders into photosensitive resin (PSR), as the weight percentage (or the volume percentage) of ceramic powders in the mixture increases, viscosity increases which affects the curing of PSR. To get sufficient strength, sintering of AM fabricated parts is necessary, this also shrinks the volume of the parts. In this paper, the additive manufacturing (AM) processes and the steps by which CLSs are being made have been reviewed and also the previous experimental and simulation research works related to CLS in which static and dynamic mechanical behaviour of different CLSs have been highlighted.