“Ceramics are materials, too!” the Adva Cera team often jokes.
Ceramics are more than just pottery. They are notably lightweight, hard, and resistant to many of the physical, chemical, and biological stressors that are present in industrial environments, all of which are advantageous for use in a technical capacity. They don’t plastically deform under an applied load like metals do, and they don’t expand and degrade in the presence of heat like polymers do. Ceramics are incredibly well-suited for some demanding applications that are currently dominated by metals and polymers, so why, as a class of materials, are they treated as the red-headed stepchild of engineering materials?
The answer mainly comes down to cost of manufacturing and risk of underperformance [compared to subtractively manufactured counterparts] and part failure. Unlike complex ceramic parts, complex metallic and polymeric parts can be manufactured at high volume and low cost. Ceramic components are typically produced through lengthy manufacturing processes, requiring expensive tools and molds to fashion moderately complex structures and multiple post-processing steps to achieve the final, usable part. Cracks, voids, and other defects are also a much larger concern in ceramics manufacturing. Metals and polymers possess structural mechanisms that can mitigate the effects of defects at low concentrations, but a single defect in a ceramic part can propagate unfettered and cause total failure.
Knowing this, ceramics’ status as the red-headed stepchild makes some sense. However, Adva Cera – aptly named for the Advanced Ceramic parts it produces – is determined to change this unduly assigned narrative around ceramics through its customer-focused, application-driven approach to additive manufacturing (AM).
The widespread commercial adoption of AM, colloquially known as 3D printing, is often described as a modern-day industrial revolution because AM’s unprecedented design freedom and near-net-shape manufacturing capacity enables the manufacturing of parts that were previously unachievable by via subtractive manufacturing. Ceramic AM holds the same magnitude of disruptive potential, but it lacks the maturity and investment opportunity that metal AM and polymer AM currently enjoy. For context, the size of the ceramic AM market reached $186.5 million in 2025, compared to roughly $2 billion and $6 billion for polymer AM and metal AM, respectively. A large share of the market exists in Western-Central Europe, where companies like Lithoz GmbH and Prodways that specialize in stereolithographic printing technologies are headquartered. Globally, the market is currently undergoing a shift to a service-driven model, where revenue from service provision exceeds that of hardware and material, signaling growing interest in the adoption of ceramic AM for commercial-scale production.
Small but mighty, with less than 15 employees, Adva Cera is spearheading the domestic push for ceramic AM adoption. Adva Cera is one of the only U.S.-based manufacturers that exclusively employs additive manufacturing platforms, mainly digital light processing (DLP), to produce ceramic components. This exclusivity has fostered something that most companies have to create artificially: a genuine mission and passion among its employees. This early in a technology’s adoption curve, every customer conversation becomes an opportunity to advocate for the technology and educate them on the benefits of (in this case) ceramic AM, how design requirements differ from those for subtractive manufacturing processes, and when it is most advantageous to use. When a customer understands ceramic AM deeply enough to consider additive design requirements from the start, Adva Cera’s job becomes easier, and the prospect of widespread adoption becomes more tangible.
“The value-add potential for 3D printed ceramics to all industries is huge, and I’m on the leading edge. We’re establishing new capabilities and baselines with each project, and that information will be used to produce standards and push industry adoption. I’m helping determine what’s possible with AM ceramics and where the industry will go,” says Adriana Joyce, Adva Cera’s Research & Development Engineer.
Adva Cera recently initiated its TRUST campaign to raise awareness of and confidence in ceramic AM among stakeholders. This push consists of publishing technical white papers, posting application spotlights on social media, hosting educational webinars, having an active presence at conferences and trade shows, and engaging with industry association partners like America Makes to demonstrate that ceramic AM, in its current state, is technical and commercially viable. All campaign messaging focuses on ceramic AM as fundamentally an enabling technology, with honest guidance on where it outperforms subtractive manufacturing processes and where it supplements them.
“Ceramic AM is poised to have the greatest impact in industries where extreme performance, complex geometries, and advanced materials are critical. As it matures, several sectors are likely to see particularly strong adoption. One of the most significant industries is semiconductor manufacturing. Their manufacturing processes take place in highly demanding environments involving high temperatures, corrosive chemicals, plasma exposure, and strict environmental controls. Alumina and zirconia are already widely used in this industry, and additive manufacturing enables new design freedoms with integrated channels, complex geometries and improved functionality,” says Dustin Williams, Adva Cera’s Vice President of Business Development.
While education and marketing are important for priming industry for adoption, quantitative efforts are also necessary to bridge the gap between the amazing things that ceramic AM do at prototyping- and feasibility-scales and being able to employ the same processes for commercial-scale production.
As a relatively new technology platform, ceramic AM lacks industry standards and qualification methodologies that prove to customers that parts being produced are quality controlled. Metals and polymers benefit from decades of work in industry standardization, with ASTM, ISO, and similar organizations having established frameworks that give scientists and engineers the confidence that they are consistently and reliably producing parts. The material behavior of AM ceramics, including the variabilities associated with curing and sintering, is not sufficiently captured in any accepted standards, meaning programs must develop their own qualification methodologies from scratch. That burden is exacerbated by the risk of defect-related part failure, which such standards are meant to address. Robust standards give customers a framework to systematically assess that risk rather than passing it off as an uncertainty. The applications in which ceramic AM is expected to offer the greatest advantages, like those in the aerospace, defense, and semiconductor manufacturing industries, carry the most demanding certification requirements, making standards development critical toward widespread adoption. Adva Cera is expeditiously collaborating with the likes of Colorado School of Mines and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on standards development projects with the hope that their eventual implementation will inspire new customers to consider ceramic AM as an option and existing customers to increase their commitment ceramic AM as a production platform.
“Investing in ceramic additive manufacturing (AM) is important because it enables industries to fully leverage the unique performance advantages of technical ceramics while overcoming many of the limitations of traditional manufacturing methods. Ceramic AM changes that dynamic by allowing parts to be designed around performance rather than manufacturing constraints. Investment in ceramic AM technology also accelerates innovation. Without the need for costly tooling or long setup times, companies can prototype and iterate designs quicker relative to subtractive lead times for the same purpose, reducing development cycles and allowing new technologies to reach the market faster,” says Williams.
All this to say that, like the AM technologies that came before, ceramic AM represents a leap in design freedom and domestic production capability. That doesn’t mean that this technology is right for every single application, but for programs where properties like thermal performance and geometric complexity are genuine constraints, it deserves serious consideration early in product development process. The customers who take the time to understand the capabilities of ceramic AM and design for them intentionally will field better products faster as the technology and the standards that support it continue to mature. And remember, when selecting a material for your demanding application, CERAMICS ARE MATERIALS, TOO!
