3-D printed ceramics are super strong

There’s a reason they’re used in everything from jet engines to Formula 1 race car brakes: Ceramics are tough. They can withstand an absurd amount of heat and pressure without warping or breaking, all while brushing off many of the physical and chemical assaults that would rust metals and wear away plastics.

“The problem is that ceramics are just notoriously difficult to process,” says Zak Eckel, an engineer at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California.

Heat-resistant ceramics require crazy-high temperatures to melt, so it’s been a struggle to develop methods to 3D-print them.

Today, there are just a few 3D printing techniques in the market that use any ceramics (developed by companies like 3DCERAM and Lithoz), but the approaches are limited in the types of ceramics they can print, as well as the end quality of their materials.

Eckel and his team have just developed an altogether new way to 3D print practically flawless ceramics —including fantastically heat-resistant varieties that have so far been beyond our reach. Their research was announced last week in the journal Science.

To understand why Eckel’s new printing process creates such interesting ceramics, it helps to understand why today’s 3D printing approaches are so limited.

To put it simply, they use clever techniques that basically print consecutive layers of ceramic particles that are suspended with a glue-like binding resin. (Imagine sand particles suspended in glue and you’ve got the idea). Once you’re done printing a part this way, you can heat it up in a furnace to fuse the individual ceramic particles together into one big ceramic piece, and dissolve away the binding glue.

Eckel’s approach is different. Instead of fusing together particles, his team creates ceramics by printing materials that look a lot like plastics — but transform into ceramics when heated in a furnace. “It’s actually a pretty simple, straightforward idea,” Eckel says.