Aircraft engine turbine blades serve as core heat-resistant hot-section components, whose intricate internal cooling architectures rely on investment casting for manufacturing. Conventional core fabrication techniques including gel casting, injection molding, and hot pressing suffer from lengthy molding cycles and excessive production costs, and are incapable of monolithic forming of complex internal cooling passages.
Traditional vat photopolymerization-based 3D printing is severely limited by slurry solid loading and viscosity thresholds: slurries with ultra-high solid loading are unprintable under ambient conditions. Further bottlenecks remain in the fabrication of large-sized ceramic cores, such as substantial overall shrinkage, anisotropic dimensional shrinkage, and severe cracking susceptibility under ultra-high casting temperatures exceeding 1500 °C. Thermal-field assisted vat photopolymerization has emerged as a promising strategy to enable the printing of high-viscosity resin feedstocks in recent years; nevertheless, research on its deployment for ceramic core manufacturing remains scarce in published literature.
Recently, a team specializing in photopolymerization printing led by Professor Songmei Yuan of Beihang University in Beijing, China, reported Temperature field assisted vat photopolymerization (TF VPP) for the fabrication of high strength, low shrinkage silica based ceramic cores: effects of spherical powders and vacuum debinding.
This work innovatively established a uniform TF-VPP preparation system. It adopted spherical silica-based powders to formulate a ceramic slurry with a high solid loading of 71 vol%, combined with vacuum debinding and sintering processes. These approaches offer a new and viable technical solution to the challenges faced in traditional VPP printing—such as significant shrinkage of large-scale cores, insufficient mechanical strength, difficulties in forming complex and delicate structures, and restrictions on the high-precision forming of ceramic slurries with ultra-high solid loading.
The team published their work in Journal of Advanced Ceramics on June 22, 202 6 .
“In this report, we developed a silica-based ceramic slurry with 71 vol% solid loading using spherical powders, which exhibits favorable Newtonian fluid characteristics and outstanding curing performance. Meanwhile, the introduction of a temperature gradient drastically reduces the slurry viscosity from 103.4 Pa·s at 25 °C to 8.6 Pa·s at 55 °C under a shear rate of 100 s⁻¹. The uniform TF-VPP system constructed in this work relieves curing stress inside high-solid-loading ceramic green bodies, optimizes surface finish, and realizes the fabrication of TPMS featuring delicate microporous architectures (minimum feature size: 50 μm).” said Songmei Yuan, professor at School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation at Beihang University (China), an expert whose research interests focus on the field of additive manufacturing technologies and equipment for ceramics, as well as high-performance machining technologies for difficult-to-cut ceramic matrix composites.
“The flexural strengths of sintered core specimens after vacuum debinding reached 12.43 MPa at room temperature (25 °C) and 22.56 MPa at high temperature (1550 °C); these samples also displayed favorable isotropic shrinkage performance.” said Professor Yuan.
However, to explore the use of VPP for producing ceramic cores with lower shrinkage rates that outperform traditional fabrication techniques, Professor Yuan noted that further systematic investigations are required to optimize material formulas, printing workflows, and integrated debinding-sintering protocols.
Other contributors include Yongyong Liu, Pengbo Niu, Yuxiang Lin, and Mingkang Zhang from the School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Beihang University, China; Zhipeng Zhang and Xiangcheng Chu from the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, China; and Shan Jiang from the Aviation Key Lab of Science and Technology on High Performance Electromagnetic Windows, Ji’nan, Shandong, China.
About Author
Songmei Yuan is a professor at the School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Beihang University, China. She received her PhD degree in Mechanical Manufacturing and Automation at Harbin Institute of Technology in 2000. She has headed over 20 major and key research programs, published over 100 academic papers, obtained more than 50 national invention patents, and authored four academic monographs. Her current interests and fields of research are additive manufacturing technologies and equipment for ceramics, and high-performance machining technologies for difficult-to-cut ceramic matrix composites.
DOI: 10.26599/JAC.2026.9221337
About Journal of Advanced Ceramics
Journal of Advanced Ceramics (JAC) is an international academic journal that presents the state-of-the-art results of theoretical and experimental studies on the processing, structure, and properties of advanced ceramics and ceramic-based composites. JAC is Fully Open Access, monthly published by Tsinghua University Press, and exclusively available via SciOpen . JAC’s 2025 IF is 14, ranking in Top 1 (1/34, Q1) among all journals in “Materials Science, Ceramics” category, and its 2025 CiteScore is 24.6 (6/133) in Scopus database. ResearchGate homepage: https://www.researchgate.net/journal/Journal-of-Advanced-Ceramics-2227-8508
Journal of Advanced Ceramics
Temperature-field assisted vat photopolymerization (TF-VPP) fabrication of high-strength, low-shrinkage silica-based ceramic cores: effects of spherical powders and vacuum debinding
22-Jun-2026