Additive manufacturing of ceramics by two-photon lithography, volumetric 3D printing and high-resolution endo-printing

Additive manufacturing is a growing sector of industrial production that allows the fabrication of parts with complex geometries and reduced waste. The context of this thesis is light-based additive manufacturing technologies. In the first part of the thesis, we explore the micro-fabrication of a highly viscous, preceramic resin with a commercially available two-photon 3D-printer. The micro-additive manufacturing of ceramics with a preceramic polymer formulation was successfully achieved. We report on the printing parameters of the preceramic polymer and pyrolysis conditions that ensured a ceramic conversion with minimum deformation and shrinkage without cracks and porosity. In the second part of the thesis, a complete set-up of a fiber endo-printer is presented that yields smooth objects with submicrometer lateral resolution. We introduce a transmission matrix method for scanning and tuning the size of the focused spot and adjust the fabrication speed. We include an exposure dose correction, which significantly improves the surface quality of the print. In the third part of the thesis, we explore centimeter scale fabrication of a preceramic resin formulation with a volumetric tomographic printing technology that allows to produce support-free, complex shapes, more challenging to produce with a conventional layer-by-layer printing technology. We report on the details of the pre-processing and post-processing steps, including formulation protocol, printing parameters and pyrolysis step that produces a high-fidelity ceramic object.