Additive Manufacturing of Ceramics and Ceramic-Based Composites: Processing, Properties, and Engineering Applications

Ceramics are widely evaluated for their extreme hardness, high-temperature stability, and corrosion resistance, which enable applications in harsh service environments. However, these same properties, high melting points, brittleness, and low thermal shock resistance, make conventional manufacturing of complex ceramic components difficult and expensive. Traditional processes often require costly diamond tooling or energy-intensive sintering and tend to produce only simple geometries, with significant waste material and risk of defects. Additive manufacturing (AM) has recently emerged as a promising route to fabricate intricate, near-net-shape ceramic parts without these drawbacks. By building components layer by layer, AM reduces the need for extensive machining and enables the fabrication of geometrically complex, near-net-shape ceramic structures with reduced material waste, although challenges such as porosity, interlayer defects, and cracking during post-processing remain. Nonetheless, ceramic AM technologies lag behind their metal and polymer counterparts, and significant challenges remain in achieving fully dense parts with reliable mechanical properties. This review provides an in-depth overview of the state of the art in ceramics and ceramic composite additive manufacturing. We detail the most widely used AM processes (stereolithography, binder jetting, material extrusion, powder bed fusion, inkjet printing, and direct energy deposition) and typical feedstock formulations for each technique. We examine the resulting mechanical properties (strength, toughness, hardness, wear resistance) and functional properties (thermal stability, dielectric behavior, biocompatibility) of additively manufactured ceramics, and discuss their current and potential engineering applications in the aerospace, defense, automotive, biomedical, and energy sectors. Persistent challenges, including porosity, shrinkage and cracking during sintering, achieving uniform microstructures, high process costs, and scalability issues, are analyzed, and we highlight promising future directions such as multi-material grading, integration of machine learning for process optimization, and sustainable manufacturing approaches. Despite significant progress, challenges remain in achieving fully dense structures, improving process reliability, and scaling ceramic AM for industrial applications, highlighting the need for further research in process optimization, material design, and multi-material integration.