HRL laboratories hit a breakthrough this year, demonstrating the possibility to 3D print fully dense ceramic materials that can withstand ultra high temperatures in excess of 1700 degree Celsius and exhibit 10 times higher strength than similar materials. Hello, I'm Zach from HRL Labs. We've invented a resin formulation compatible with stereolithography or 3D printing which after printing can be fired to produce a fully dense ceramic part. This is an amazing breakthrough as it allows us to produce freeform ceramic parts of extremely strong and temperature resilient ceramics without any machining, casting, or compaction. We can leverage many of the benefits of 3D printing, the ability to create complex street metal parts with a highly useful engineering material. In 3D printing, successive layers of material are formed under computer control to create an object. These objects can be of almost any shape or geometry. A wide variety of materials can be used to create 3D objects including ceramics. But historically ceramics were of limited use because they were found porous and lacking strength. Up to now it was not possible to make complex parts out of this unique material. With our 3D printing process we can easily print pretty much any shape that you desire, fire it, and then we have a complex shaped part out of a high temperature ceramic. But our material can be used in 3D printing which results in a fully dense ceramic part which is able to achieve the near theoretical strength of the parent ceramic material as well as survive extremely high temperatures in air. So let's go to the lab and see how we've done this. This is a stereo lithography 3D printer that we filled with our newly developed pre-ceramic resin. We're printing a part by rastering the laser over the parts geometry, wherever the laser hits the resin it cures into a polymer. The unique thing about this pre-ceramic polymer is that we can fire it to convert it into a ceramic. Current methods generally produce parts with their brittle and under machining can fall apart, therefore limiting their applications. This ceramic can withstand extremely high temperatures. I'm testing it here with a blowtorch. The flame exceeds 1000 degrees Celsius and the material doesn't melt or deteriorate. Also this ceramic has a really low thermal conductivity, so my fingers don't get hot. As you can see the material is unchanged. If I do the same test with a metal sheet you will see that the metal quickly melts. I also have to use tongs because the metal conducts heat much faster. 3D printing can be a slow process, taking many hours to produce a single complex part. Once the part has been 3D printed it is placed in a high temperature kiln where it is fired overnight. The polymer formation invented by HRL is also compatible with our self-propagating photopolymer waveguide process which can create a part on the order of seconds to minutes. The cutting edge process and material have the potential to be used in a myriad of applications in a variety of industries. From large components and jet engines in the hypersonic vehicles all the way to tiny intricate parts in micro-electrical mechanical systems and electronic device packaging. The details have been published in the January 2016 issue of Science magazine.