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Making ceramic parts with bionic structures was almost impossible about a decade ago until the 3D-printing of ceramics started to become more and more developed. When I started my professional career – more than seven years ago - printing of ceramics was a new hyped topic. My favorite material during my studies was ceramic and during LUT summer school in Lappeenranta my passion for additive manufacturing was woken up. Thus, a job on research and development of a 3D printing method for ceramics was perfect and I started working at Kyocera (back then still H.C. Starck Ceramics) in Selb. At that time, I was the first one to work on that topic in the company. 

Nevertheless, the interest on printing parts to enable complex geometries was and is high at Kyocera Fineceramics Europe GmbH as the main target products are unique or small series parts. Thus, 3D printing seems very suitable.  The focus for the additive manufacturing was set for large-sized parts. In a cooperation with BAM the easily scalable so-called “Layerwise slurry deposition (LSD-) print” technology was developed for silicon carbide parts. 

Together with Pedro Lima and Andrea Zocca I developed this LSD-print for the printing of silicon infiltrated silicon carbide. Slurries were prepared in Selb and printed at BAM in Berlin.
Even though working at industry I got the chance to go into more detail than usually in industrial development processes and could perform experiments and tests to get data for my Phd thesis which I planned, summarized and wrote in my free time in addition to my full-time job as a project leader. 

Apart from the LSD-print I was working on direct ink writing (DIW) of silicon nitride together with Giorgia Franchin and later Anna de Marzi from the University of Padova. Working on more technologies and having bought the first printers we hired new colleagues and step by step a small additive manufacturing team formed. I became a team leader and my focus shifted from research to organizing tasks and planning the next steps as well as setting up long term projects including administrative tasks such as planning of new machines and calculating potential production costs for a 3D-printed part. Luckily, I can keep up to date to research topics. On the one hand I am, of course, still supporting challenges in my team and on the other hand I can learn about the latest developments by taking part in conferences such as yCAM (young ceramists additive manufacturing forum: https://ecers.org/ycam-forum). 

Since 2023 I am not only a participant at yCAM but part of the organizing team together with Anna de Marzi and Johanna Sänger. It is a pleasure but also sometimes stressful being an organizer of such an event enabling fruitful discussions of young ceramists. It would be great to see you at the next edition in Toulouse in April 2025 and discuss your topic or getting to know you at the welcome reception. Let us pave the way for a breakthrough of AM of ceramics in industry together by solving topics such as more automized post-processing, finding the right applications and customers and designing interesting parts and some more.