Casting ceramics in rubber molds

Michael wrote in message ...
This was sent to me via private email from someone who read what I had
done with rubber, silicone and plastic molds and ceramics (slip
casting). Apparently what I have done HAS in fact been done elsewhere
and even more.

Here is a link.

It seems that a Professor in Tokyo has managed to pour slip castings in
a production environment thus avoiding the longer drying times I wrote
about via implementing a "nonaqueous carrier" that allows faster drying
in a non-porous mold. he is doing this in a rubber mold.

http://www.wtec.org/loyola/rp/07_02.htm

Slip casting?

Professor Nakagawa of the University of Tokyo mentioned to JTEC/WTEC
panelists that ceramic parts are typically fabricated in plaster molds,
usually using slip casting. He recently developed a nonaqueous carrier
for the ceramic, which does not require a porous mold. Nakagawa
successfully cast ceramic into a rubber mold, which opens the
possibility of having reusable molds that can be created rapidly using
an RP master.

United States

In the United States, universities, industries, and government
laboratories have been actively working with ceramic materials. Several
licensees are commercializing aspects of MIT's "Three-Dimensional
Printing" program These include Soligen, which offers the "Direct Shell
Production Casting" machine. The machine "writes" patterns for molds
directly into ceramic powder using a binder dispersed via an ink-jet
printer head. The resulting pattern is then cleaned of loose powder and
sintered to provide a shell into which metal can be cast. A host of
other processes are under development, most of which are tied to
modifications of existing commercial systems. Some of these efforts are
mentioned below.

Selective laser sintering of ceramic powders and fusing of coated
ceramics are being investigated by DTM and the University of Texas. Both
Lone Peak Engineering and the University of Dayton are investigating
production of ceramic tapes and use of these tapes in the laminated
object manufacturing (LOM) environment. In addition, the University of
Dayton is extending this process to ceramic composites using both
chopped and continuous fiber reinforcement in its tape systems. Ceramic
loading of photopolymers for use in stereolithography systems is being
developed at the University of Michigan. Argonne National Laboratories
and Rutgers University are developing ceramic-loaded filaments that
will be compatible with fused deposition molding systems, similar to the
multiphase jet solidification (MJS) system being developed in Europe.
Case Western Reserve University is developing the CAM-LEM system, which
utilizes ceramic material delivered in sheet format. Each material layer
is cut by a 5-axis laser cutter that shapes the edge to match the slope
of the part at every location. The layers are then robotically stacked
and sintered to form the part. Other efforts include the program at
Stanford Research Institute to develop a filled photopolymer.

The U.S. effort encompasses the development of ceramic molds for casting
and the fabrication of both monolithic and composite ceramic parts. The
particular ceramics under study include lower-temperature oxides and the
higher-temperature materials such as SiC and AlN. RP fabrication of
ceramic components could potentially open a variety of application areas
that heretofore have been cost-prohibitive.

It is NOT impossible.
Michael

Still trying to make tooling & stuff to slip cast 180 3/4" squares
roughly 1/8-3/16 thick using Silicone Rubber or Latex molds like your
wife
(per you) does in her hobby?
--
Cliff