Compared to metals and polymers, additive manufacturing (AM) or 3D printing of ceramics is particularly desirable because traditional ceramic manufacturing methods based on powder consolidation and sintering are costly, while casting and machining ceramics is nontrivial.

There are several powder-based additive manufacturing processes for ceramics, including stereolithography (SLA), binder jetting, robocasting/direct ink writing (DIW), and laser sintering. In the SLA process, which goes back to as early as 1996,¹ a photosensitive resin containing ceramic particles (up to 60 vol%) is selectively cured.^1,2 After fabrication of the green body, the binder is removed (debinding process) by heating at about 600°C, followed by sintering at more than 1,500°C to obtain the final ceramic part. Fully dense ceramics with more than 97% of the theoretical density have been reported after sintering.²