As the 3D printing industry expands, increasingly, events focused on specific applications, verticals, or platforms become necessary. Opening this year’s AM Ceramics conference in Vienna, Lithoz CEO Johannes Homa reflected on how additive manufacturing of ceramics has evolved from an academic experiment to an industrially established technology. Homa noted that Lithoz, founded in 2011 as a university spinout, has grown from a small research group in Nuremberg to a company of almost 150 employees, reflecting how rapidly the market has matured. Hosting the conference in Vienna, he said, was symbolic: “This was the birthplace of Lithoz… what started as a small idea to 3D print ceramics has now become a community.” Homa stressed that AM Ceramics is more than a technical forum, it serves to build collaboration, friendships, and shared progress across academia and industry.
I visited AM Ceramics 2025 to see how the future of 3D printing ceramics is shaping up.
Opening the conference, representatives from the Vienna Business Agency underscored the city’s commitment to fostering advanced manufacturing, revealing that over €2 million in public funds have supported additive manufacturing projects in the past three years. The event’s technical sessions, moderated by Dr. Albert Tarancón of IREC, featured leading researchers such as Fraunhofer IKTS’s Dr. Uwe Scheithauer, who examined the barriers preventing ceramics AM from reaching full-scale industrialization. Scheithauer identified the need for standardization, automation, and clearer communication of the technology’s benefits, arguing that adoption depends on trust, demonstrators, and finding applications where ceramics’ unique properties justify the cost. “Additive manufacturing will enrich the world,” he said, “but only through collaboration, validation, and the courage to rethink design itself.”
AM Ceramics also gave me an opportunity to present some of the work 3DPI does beyond our regular reporting. My presentation urged the sector to look beyond machines and materials to the incentives and feedback loops that shape adoption. Drawing lessons from other domains, I argued that metals show how scaling is often a regulatory and paperwork problem as much as an engineering one. At the same time, polymers illustrate the risk of confusing speed with value. Ceramics sits at a crossroads: it must be precise enough to trust, fast enough to use, and valuable enough to endure, avoiding hype-driven cycles by synchronising validation with capacity.
I outlined diagnostic frameworks used by UBIK Intelligence (3DPI’s analytics department) such as a Collapse Curve Early Warning System, a Global Interdependence Mapper, a Visibility–Power Inversion Index, a Lexical Volatility Index, and a Historical Structure Decoder, to spot fragility, hidden supply dependencies, noise-to-signal imbalances, language drift and repeated boom-bust patterns. I gave an overview of the “replicator paradox,” where the ability to make anything dilutes focus, and advocated reclaiming the “beauty of boring” from CNC: interoperability, documentation, and predictability that build trust at scale.
If you would like to access some of the frameworks we use for UBIK, then I invite you to explore our third wave diagnostic test here.
Additive ceramic cores for next-generation turbine cooling
Safran’s Dr Wen Zhang outlined how rising turbine inlet temperatures are forcing new core designs and manufacturing routes for cooled turbine blades. Safran, a €27 billion-revenue group with more than 100,000 employees and c.€2 billion in annual R&D (2024), targets hotter, more efficient engines through advances in superalloys, internal cooling, film cooling and thermal-barrier coatings. However, next-generation cooling circuits are too complex for conventional core injection alone, pushing Safran to evaluate ceramic cores made by additive manufacturing within the investment-casting process.
Early AM trials exposed gaps versus production needs: insufficient phase stability at casting temperatures, excessive high-temperature shrinkage, and low mechanical strength leading to failures during wax injection and pouring. Safran concluded it had to control feedstock composition rather than “black-box” materials, and established a formal collaboration with Lithoz to co-develop a tailored ceramic feedstock. With the new material, functional casting tests produced blades comparable to those made with injected cores, and work is now focused on printing more complex cores, fixing specifications for feedstock and cores, and advancing technology transfer from Safran Tech to production units.
Zhang stressed AM cores are not intended to replace injection molding on cost or volume, but to enable parts that cannot be made otherwise. To industrialise, Safran is prioritising automation (e.g., core cleaning), in-process inspection and data collection, plus earlier defect detection through in-situ monitoring to stop bad builds quickly. In Q&A, Safran said target volumes are application-driven rather than mass-production, mechanical properties are currently assessed on test bars, and broader adoption will hinge on trusted material supply, transparency over formulations, and long-term quality assurance, points echoed by Lithoz in response to concerns about material access and consistency.
Glassomer brings ceramic-processing logic to fully dense fused silica
Glassomer CSO Dr Frederik Kotz-Helmer detailed how the Freiburg-based company manufactures fully dense fused-silica glass parts by adapting ceramic processing routes. Two shaping methods underpin the portfolio: a photo-curable nanoparticle resin for DLP 3D printing (green body / debind / sinter to 100% density) and an injection-moulding granulate processed at 100–200°C with fast, largely aqueous debinding before sintering. The resulting parts match standard fused-silica properties, broadband optical transmission, low thermal expansion (~0.5 ppm/K), high thermal/chemical stability, and are delivered across optics, photonics, micro-technology, and analytical devices, from sub-micron diffractive features to biochips and harsh-environment components.
Real-world use cases included printed internals for chemical distillation columns (integrated into conventional glass tubing) and stocked, printed glass connectors that customers flame-polish and assemble on demand. A research highlight with the Max Planck Institute in Erlangen targets photonic crystal fibres via a “print-and-draw” route: 40-cm preforms with 500–800 µm wall features are printed, debound, sintered, and drawn down to fibres that already guide light over kilometres. The current limiter on ultra-low attenuation is minor geometry deviation arising from resin residues and purity; work is advancing on wash strategies, chlorine-treated high-purity sintering, and fibre-optimized preform designs. For printed optics, Glassomer is collaborating on heterogeneous exposure strategies to suppress stair-stepping and achieve smooth, optically clear surfaces directly from the printer.
On the injection-moulding side, Glassomer is shipping higher-volume parts where surface replication and alignment matter: UVC illumination optics (~250 nm), micro-lenses, precision V-grooves (±2 µm on 250 µm pitch) and 200-µm pipetting nozzles held to ±2 µm. The firm also introduced an opaque “black” fused silica for integrated light-blocking and demonstrated 2K co-moulding of transparent/black silica into a single sintered component. Beyond industry, a Boucheron, a luxury maison, has showcased a limited “5D” glass ring produced by Glassomer, with femtosecond-laser inscription used for embedded data storage, an example of glass AM and moulding unlocking forms and functions unattainable with conventional glass shaping.
Escaping flatland: TPMS geometries for solid-oxide energy devices
DTU professor Vincenzo Esposito argued that functional-ceramic energy devices must escape “flatland” manufacturing and be redesigned as true 3D architectures. Focusing on solid-oxide cell (SOC/SOEC) technology, he said the field’s laminated, tape-cast stacks impose costly, fragile interfaces and wasteful process steps. His group instead uses triple-periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS) printed at high resolution to create monolithic scaffolds that combine dense and porous regions and separate fuel and air pathways in three dimensions—an approach inspired by bone microstructures.
Prototypes built on state-of-the-art ceramic printers were shell-encapsulated and then functionalised by impregnating the two sides with conventional electrode chemistries, avoiding multi-material co-printing. Early tests using standard zirconia/LSM-type systems showed sharp gains in power density alongside markedly better mechanical behaviour: TPMS geometries distribute stress, cut inter-plane strain and are inherently more tolerant to thermal and mechanical loads than planar stacks. Esposito noted that metrology and test rigs must be rethought, since established fixtures and protocols assume flat cells.
Extending the concept, his team printed lead-free piezoelectric TPMS to create electro-mechanical metamaterials that exhibit unusual actuation, including negative Poisson-like responses, enabling compact pumps and actuators with complex 3D strain fields. In discussion, Esposito said materials remain mainstream and cost-competitive, the value case comes from higher power density and robustness rather than replacing low-cost tape casting, and the next steps are scale-up, in-situ monitoring and application-driven designs where additive manufacturing enables parts “that cannot be made otherwise.”
Across aerospace, optics, and energy systems, AM Ceramics 2025 illustrated a field steadily outgrowing its experimental origins. The Safran, Glassomer, and DTU examples shared little in application yet converged on a similar trajectory: additive routes are not chasing volume for its own sake, but enabling architectures that conventional processes cannot reach. Each case framed AM ceramics not as a cheaper replacement but as a route to higher temperature, tighter precision or genuinely new device geometries, outcomes that justify complexity rather than try to disguise it.
What remains is less a materials breakthrough than an organisational one. Trust will hinge on transparent feedstocks, qualified supply chains, consistent inspection, and, above all, demonstrators that prove value in end-use environments. As Homa noted, the technology already has its community; the task ahead is to turn that community into a coherent industrial ecosystem where ceramics can be used because they work, not because they are new.
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Featured image shows Johannes Homa CEO Lithoz opening AM Ceramics 2025. Photo via Lithoz.
