3D printing of ceramic composite with biomimetic toughening design

Damage-tolerant ceramics with great toughness are highly required for a variety of practical applications owing to their outstanding chemical and mechanical stability, but current processing strategies are impossible to create parts with complex or customized geometries due to restrictions on the shape of mold. This work reports a promising method to fabricate geometrically complex ceramic composite components with exceptional damage tolerance by exploiting additive manufacturing (AM) and novel biomimetic toughening design. As-fabricated ceramic composites avoid catastrophic failure and exhibit remarkable improvements in toughness (≈116 times) comparable to those of pure ceramics, and possess customized geometries that cannot be created by conventional method. Such bioinspired ceramic composites processed by AM create exciting opportunities for the customization applications, such as dental restorations, which are demonstrated in this work.