As suggested HERE, the ceramic resin has to be fired for 28 hours after the the object has been printed, washed and dried.
To my knowledge on ceramic processing, tradition ceramic only requires 8-15 hours to fire in a kiln depends on the size of the ceramic object. 28 hours to fire Ceramic resin as suggested by Formlabs is just doubled the time in comparing with the firing on traditional ceramic material.
If i am to 3D print some small ceramic parts (like a normal ring on a finger), would it still need to burn for whole 28 hours? Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated!
Hi @pyue6299, thanks for trying out the Ceramic Resin!
In our ceramic parts, you need to burn out a resin matrix before continuing on with sintering the ceramic particles. The longest part of the firing schedule - a hold at 240 C - corresponds to this process. The good news is If you have a small part, you can decrease the time of the hold at 240 C.
The link that you referred to has some detailed notes about this below the firing schedule graph. The amount of time that you hold at the “burnout” temperature scales with the maximum wall thickness in your part. (e.g. if the max wall thickness is 15mm, the hold time is 15 hours; if the wall thickness is 2mm, the hold time is 2 hours.)
There are some other tips listed, too, that might let you to shorten the total firing time, depending on the size + geometry of your print.
Hi @arusso, thanks for the info! i am very excited to try out Formlabs’s ceramic resin. And the resin is its way to my workshop today.
To clarify:
the official recommended firing schedule of 480 mins of burnout hold is for object that has a max wall thickness of 48 mm?
Other than the burnout hold time that can be minimized depends on the wall thickness of an object, any other stage of the firing which can also be minimized? where is the other tips that has been listed for teaching us shorten the total firing time?
Active ventilation only in need for RAMP 1 and BURNOUT HOLD, right? After that, i can close my ventilation system for RAMP2, SINTERING HOLD and COOL DOWN stage right? making the object to be fired in a closed environment within the chamber of the kiln?
Hi @pyue6299, First of all, I amended my wall thickness example above to change 1mm to 2mm – the minimum wall thickness recommended by our design guide is 2mm.
To answer your first 2 questions, I believe 480min / 60 = 8 hours, which would correspond to a 8 mm wall thickness.
The PDF version of our guide may have slightly more detail than the online guide, regarding the firing schedule. Keep in mind that this is still an experimental material, so you’ll probably discover your own tricks and best practices for your application once you have the material in hand.
I’ll see if I can get you some help on the ventilation question
I think I will be using Orton Ventmaster for my ventilation system. If there is no need for ventilation at all after burnout hold stage, do I just turn off the ventilation system?
