I am trying to know , functionally graded beam made of aluminium as metal and alumina or silicon carbide as ceramic can be fabricate by using 3D printing process. what are the material and dimensional constraint?
The answer is, in principle, yes, you can produce a functionally graded material (FGM) by Additive Manufacturing. If you wish to produce Al/SiC with a changing content of SiC, you can try at least two different techniques (depending on you printing facilities).
First, you can use a "gentle" (to prevent a turbulence of molten metal) selective laser melting (SLM) of Al/SiC powders blend through slight changing SiC content, as desired, to obtain FGM.
Second, you can try to print (by binder-jet method) a porous SiC preform with slightly changing density and then to perform infiltration of molten Aluminum from the preform's top.
Anyway, you processing parameters cannot be mentioned here, because you just need to try these processes and to adjust them properly.
The problem is more to get no functionally graded material since the locally changing conditions are so badly defined that it automatically results. It might be accidentally possible that you can control it in a way you need it, but I would not be that optimistic. In materials science (nearly) all materials are first homogenized to have a definite situation and in a next step they will be graded somehow. This already takes a lot of testing time, i.e. it is practically non-predictable. To believe that this can be turned around is from my point of view quite naive, although 3D printing seems to be currently for many people the holy grail. I wonder where are all these experienced material scientists remained?
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