Computer-Aided Manufacturing of Laminated Engineering Materials (CAM-LEM) and its Application to the Fabrication of Ceramic Components Without Tooling

Advanced ceramics such as alumina, silicon carbide and silicon nitride (monolithics and composites) have properties that suggest application in gas turbine engines. However, the production of components from these materials is very different from that typical of superalloys and this has limited the range of applications for ceramics in gas turbines. The manufacturing freedom offered by the recently developed technologies termed “rapid prototyping,” RP, or equivalently, “solid freeform fabrication,” SFF, may enable a much wider range of applications to be served in the future. RP was developed to allow production of form-and-fit models without the need for tooling and has proven to be a key assel in the design of new components as well as for the implementation of design changes to existing ones. Direct SFF using engineering materials to prototype components is undergoing continued development and is expected to provide an enabling technology that promises to change design philosophies for components made from ceramics (and other powder-based materials). In this paper, the opportunities for SFF in gas turbine applications are discussed, a brief state-of-the-art overview of RP and its application to engineering ceramics is provided, and a particular process, CAM-LEM, is highlighted.