Research
Feasibility Study of Digital Manufacturing Systems Applied for Medium Scale Production
Purpose: Along the last years, the complexity of products has been growing progressively, while the product development life-cycle tended to be reduced. In addition to that, additive manufacturing technologies increased their role in the product development process, resulting in reduction of errors and products release time. In spite of these benefits, the main application of these technologies is still focused on initial phases of projects and results in high costs of parts and low volumes. On the other hand, although conventional produtivity processes results in low costs and high volumes, the investiment related to these processes are high and the implementation time are long. For that reason, the main goal of this work is to investigate the possibility of application of additive manufacturing technologies for small and medium scale production.
Investigation of Ceramic Dental Prostheses based on ZrSiO4 – Glass Composites Fabricated by Indirect Additive Manufacturing
Technologies for dental prosthesis and restoration have been developed during the past years. Despite the advantages of additive manufacturing, CAD/CAM technologies lead prostheses fabrication. Therefore, the main goal of this work is to investigate the fabrication of dental prosthesis based on ZrSiO4-glass composites applying the indirect fused deposition modelling. In order to achieve this goal, we used filaments filled by 90% of ZrSiO4 and 50μm glass spheres in order to fabricate prosthesis. We also applied multivariable approach to scan the feasibility of the proposed process. Holding temperature, holding time, heating rate and cooling rate were considered the control factors while shrinkage, flexural strength, process feasibility were the study responses. It was possible to see the proposal feasibility for holding temperatures between 700 and 800°C and holding time between 1 and 4 hours. Additionally, the materials flexural strength was found between 25 and 85MPa, while shrinkage fluctuated between 10 and 25%.
