the exception of the leftmost cube, are relatively white and
have a “sugar-cube” texture, whereas the cubes on the right
are gray and have a smoother, glass-like texture. The furthest
cube on the left is as-printed or green, followed by cubes with
ascending peak firing temperatures, ending with the rightmost
cube fired at 7608C. Firing printed objects directly on the
kiln-shelf typically increases the anisotropic shrinkage
behavior, which can be seen in Figure 7. This phenomenon
is a result of a temperature gradient within the kiln, as well as
between the object and the shelf. A solution would be to allow
the thermal gradient between the object and the shelf to reach
equilibrium by applying a more complicated heating schedule
than the one explained below. Heating schedule optimization
was outside the scope of this research and will be examined, in
depth, in subsequent analyses.