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Additive manufacturing of ceramics has been actively investigated with the objective of fabricating complex structures that compete in terms of material performance with traditionally manufactured ceramics but with the benefit of increased geometric freedom. More specifically, zirconia provides high fracture toughness and thermal stability. In addition, its dielectric permittivity may be the highest among materials available for 3D printing, and may enable the next generation of complex electromagnetic structures. NanoParticle Jetting™ is a new material jetting process for selectively depositing nanoparticles and is capable of printing zirconia. Dense, fine-featured parts can be manufactured with layer thicknesses as small as 10 μm and jetting resolution of 20 μm after a final sintering step. For this study, 3D printed zirconia using NanoParticle Jetting™ was characterized in terms of chemistry, density, crystallography, sintering shrinkage and dielectric properties as a foundation for developing high performance radio frequency (RF) components. The experimental results indicate a yttria-stabilized ZrO2 structure exhibiting a bulk relative permittivity of 23 and a loss tangent of 0.0013 at microwave frequencies. A simple zirconia dielectric resonator antenna is measured, confirming the measured dielectric properties and illustrating a practical application of this material.
Oh et al. (Wed,) studied this question.