Reusable Salt Binders for Sustainable Ceramic Additive Manufacturing

Ceramic additive manufacturing offers the potential to reduce material waste and enable geometrically complex components for high-temperature and energy-intensive applications. However, current approaches rely heavily on proprietary organic binders and narrowly qualified powders, limiting feedstock flexibility, complicating post-processing, and constraining broader adoption of cleaner and more resilient manufacturing routes. This research aims to establish a scientific foundation for salt-based binder systems as an alternative pathway for shaping and consolidating ceramic materials. Salt solutions are inexpensive, water-based, widely available, and potentially reusable, making them attractive candidates for sustainable manufacturing. If their interactions with ceramic powders can be understood and controlled, they could reduce binder complexity, broaden the range of usable feedstocks, and enable more adaptable manufacturing processes. The resulting knowledge will support the development of low-cost ceramic components such as filters, heat exchangers, molds, and thermal management systems while strengthening domestic supply-chain resilience and promoting more efficient use of industrial byproducts and waste streams. The project will also provide interdisciplinary training for graduate researchers at the intersection of mechanics, materials science, and advanced manufacturing, while fostering broader participation through outreach and sustained international research engagement. The project will investigate the coupled physicochemical mechanisms governing salt-assisted ceramic additive manufacturing. The central hypothesis is that concentrated salt solutions can generate green strength in ceramic powder beds through ionic transport, interparticle bridging, and evolving microstructure during wetting and drying, while also enabling molten-salt-assisted sintering pathways during thermal processing that reduce sensitivity to powder chemistry and morphology. Experimental studies will examine representative oxide and nitride ceramic powders together with selected salts spanning a range of valences, solubilities, and melting behaviors. Processing studies will progress from simple cylindrical pellets to layered and overhanging printed geometries to evaluate green strength, layer adhesion, dimensional retention, shrinkage, and densification. Characterization methods including microscopy, spectroscopy, mechanical testing, full-field strain measurements, x-ray diffraction, and x-ray imaging will be used to connect processing conditions to microstructural evolution and material properties. In parallel, multiscale models of transport, electrostatic interactions, and constitutive behavior will be developed to interpret experimental observations and identify robust processing windows. The outcomes will establish a mechanistic process-structure-property framework for salt-based ceramic additive manufacturing, providing predictive insight and practical guidance for the design of more feedstock-tolerant, sustainable, and scalable ceramic manufacturing systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2547059 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Ranajay Ghosh | Institution: The University of Central Florida Board of Trustees, ORLANDO, FL | Award Amount: $449,971 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2547059 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2547059.html