Additive manufacturing (AM) of ceramic materials is a powerful shaping technology offering completely new design possibilities. However, AM of ceramics is particularly challenging because the shaping process is embedded in a complex manufacturing scheme. In the case of multi-material printing, the thermal expansion behavior of the materials needs to be carefully adjusted for the co-sintering process.  Know How from established 2D and 2,5 D multi-layer ceramic technologies such as LTCC (low temperature co-fired ceramics) or multi-component injection moulding can be employed to address these issues.  The ceramic AM-methods can be divided into powder based and suspension based techniques resulting in porous or dense components, resp. A combination of dense and porous structures is possible as well. Examples will be presented focusing on new additive manufacturing methods such as ceramic fused filament and ceramic 3D-thermoplastic printing.

An important demand for all AM technologies is the improvement of reliability and performance of the manufactured components. Due to the time-consuming manufacturing processes and the layer-wise building process it is necessary to control the quality of each layer in order to repair a defect layer or to stop the building process to avoid waste of time and expensive material loss. Therefore, it is important to access the quality of the printed parts as early as possible. This requires in-operando non-destructive evaluation methods. For this, we present new optical methods such as speckle laser spectroscopy and optical coherence tomography.

For a further functionalization of the AM parts, 2D printing technologies are applied. We present first results on this combination of 3D and 2D printing that we call 5 D printing. Furthermore, the hybridization, i.e. the combination of AM and conventional shaping technologies such as injection moulding is covered.