Thesis

3D printing technology is making its way into the construction industry. While other sectors have already seen widespread market adoption, our industry‘s need for large-format components presents additive manufacturing with its own unique challenges. The research and development of such components often still takes place on a trial-and-error basis and thus requires an enormous effort, as 3D printing processes often take hours or even days. A novel approach(1) links the geometry to be printed with the rheological properties of the raw material and tries to predict their printability in a process with tree degrees of freedom, using finite element methodology. This approach has already been verified in terms of feasibility.

The purpose of the study is to first adapt the existing methodology to the research on additive manufacturing of clay and ceramic components carried out at the TU Darmstadt. In a second step the methodology needs to be developed further, to enable the simulation of a printing-process six degrees of freedom. Finally, predictions have to be made which kinds of geometries could be possible to print with this evolved process, and which limitations of it might have.