Cure behavior of colorful ZrO2 suspensions during Digital light processing (DLP) based stereolithography process

In this study, the light absorption of the pure ZrO 2 and three types of colorful ZrO 2 mixtures were investigated. It was found that the absorbance of colored ZrO 2 powder increases with the colorant content, and the yellow-colored powder has the strongest absorbance at the wavelength of 405 nm compared with the other two types of colored ZrO 2 powder. The cure behavior investigation on the ceramic suspensions of the above four types of ZrO 2 powders during DLP process shows that as the colorant content increases, the cure depth and excess cure width both decrease due to the ceramic absorbance. The cure depth of colored suspensions is linear with logarithm of incident energy, consistent with Beer-Lambert model, while the further research into the cure width shows that the excess cure width increases nonlinearly with logarithm of incident energy, which is inconsistent with Quasi-Beer-Lambert model. Additionally, colorful ZrO 2 accessories were successfully fabricated.