The Future of Manufacturing Is Here: Latest Advances in Ceramic 4D Printing Research at Southern University of Science and Technology

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October 29, 2025 Hardware 947

4D Printing & The Research

4D printing is an emerging manufacturing technology developed from 3D printing that integrates smart materials and mechanical design into the printing process. Under external environmental stimuli such as light, heat, electricity, or magnetism, 4D-printed structures can change their shape or function over time, showing broad application prospects in fields like biomedical engineering and aerospace. Currently, materials capable of 4D printing are mainly limited to smart soft materials such as hydrogels, shape memory polymers, and liquid crystal elastomers. There remain numerous technical bottlenecks for the 4D printing of hard materials like ceramics. Existing ceramic 4D printing primarily relies on direct ink writing technology and often requires molds for structural pre-programming, leaving room for improvement in efficiency and precision. Therefore, there is a need to develop an efficient, high-precision ceramic 4D printing technology that requires neither molds nor external force-assisted deformation.

A collaborative team led by Professor Ge Qi and Associate Professor Yuan Chao has proposed a ceramic 4D printing method driven by hydrogel dehydration. The research team developed a photosensitive ceramic elastomer slurry and an acrylic hydrogel precursor suitable for DLP printing. Both materials can undergo significant deformation after photocuring; the ceramic elastomer green body can withstand tensile strains of up to 700%, and the hydrogel can achieve a volume shrinkage rate of up to 65% during dehydration, accompanied by a more than 40-fold increase in modulus. This achievement was published in Nature Communications under the title "Direct 4D printing of ceramics driven by hydrogel dehydration."

This work utilizes a self-developed multi-material photolithography 4D printing equipment to print hydrogel-ceramic elastomer laminate structures. The dehydration of the hydrogel drives the evolution of the planar pattern directly into a complex 3D structure, which is then converted into a pure ceramic structure through high-temperature debinding and sintering (Figure 1). This method enables the direct 4D printing of ceramic structures without the need for additional shape programming.

Basic principle and process of ceramic 4D printing.

During the sintering process, the curved laminate structure exhibited curvature reversal. Through experimental research and finite element simulation, the research team attributed this phenomenon to the uneven shrinkage along the thickness direction of the laminate during sintering. Considering both the deformation of the laminate structure during hydrogel dehydration and the curvature reversal during sintering, the team established a constitutive model based on phase transition to describe the stiffness increase and volume shrinkage of the hydrogel during dehydration. This was combined with laminate beam theory to predict the dehydration-induced bending process of the ceramic elastomer-hydrogel laminate. Finally, the deformation gradient-induced non-uniform shrinkage during ceramic sintering was introduced into the theoretical model to calculate the final structural bending deformation. The theoretical predictions showed excellent agreement with experimental results (Figure 2). The design mechanism diagram plotted using the theoretical model can quantitatively present the mapping relationship between structural deformation and structural parameters, providing effective guidance for the design of hydrogel-ceramic laminate structures.

Curvature reversal phenomenon of ceramic structures during sintering and its theoretical model prediction.

Using a regular tetrahedron as a specific example, the design process for ceramic 4D printing is demonstrated, where the experimental results are consistent with the initial design goals. The reverse design process for ceramic 4D printing is as follows (Figure 3):

Extract characteristic parameters of the target configuration through 3D modeling.

Design a planar pattern to determine the design parameters.

Calculate the design parameters using the theoretical model.

Predict the 3D shape via finite element simulation.

Realize the configuration transformation from the laminate structure to the target 3D shape through multi-material printing.

Reverse design process for ceramic 4D printing.

By applying diverse pattern designs to planar laminate structures, various 3D ceramic structures such as cubic boxes, Miura origami structures, a crane, a three-leaf fan, and a scorpion can be achieved (Figure 4). Compared to methods like mold-assisted deformation or manual folding, this direct ceramic 4D printing technology driven by hydrogel dehydration enables simpler, more efficient, and more precise manufacturing of various 3D ceramic structures, opening up new avenues for the design and fabrication of complex ceramic geometries.

Complex 3D structures fabricated by ceramic 4D printing.

microArch® M150

BMF's precision 4D printing technology, in collaboration with other partners, has led to the new multi-material 4D printing solution – the microArch® M150. It supports the integrated forming of multi-functional materials including rigid resins, elastomers, hydrogels, shape memory polymers, and conductive elastomers.

Centrifugal Multi-Material Switching Technology: Maximum centrifugal speed of up to 10,000 rpm, enabling rapid dynamic switching between multiple materials within 60 seconds. Supports up to 2,500 material transitions in a single print job.

Supporting Multi-Material Slicing Software: Self-developed multi-material model slicing system supports slicing models with arbitrary spatial distribution of multiple materials, achieving slicing speeds of up to 500 layers/minute.

Supports Various High-Performance 4D Printing Functional Materials: Adapts to a diverse 4D printing material system with a viscosity range of 5 - 5,000 cps.

Integrated Forming of Multi-Material, Multi-Functional Coupled Structures: Enables the integrated forming of highly complex, high-precision, multi-functional coupled structures. Supports printing with 3 materials simultaneously, allows for in-layer/inter-layer multi-material switching, and achieves an in-layer multi-material transition zone size of < 100 micrometers.

Original article link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45039-y