Tetragonal And Cubic Zirconia Multilayered Ceramics: Investigation Of Electrical Parameters During Automated Epd Processing

The interest in electrophoretic deposition (EPD) of ceramics has widely increased owing to its versatility to combine different materials in unique shapes and structures interesting for several applications (e.g. solid oxide fuel cells, thermal barrier coatings, and biomaterials). In this work, an automated robotic EPD set-up was constructed and used to produce tetragonal and cubic zirconia multi-layered specimens, which combine the high conductivity of the cubic layer with the high toughness of the tetragonal layer. This automated EPD set up allowed us to study in detail the very sensitive EPD process, whose success highly depends on a good control of the EPD parameters. Tetragonal layers of 20um and cubic layers of 10um were obtained with high reproducibility. The in situ measurement of the electric current evolution with the deposition time enabled analysis of the EPD process for each layer.