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Lithoz was founded 14 years ago, as a spin-off of the TU Wien, by Johannes Homa and Johannes Benedikt. Meanwhile, Lithoz is a well-known player in the ceramic community, and its well-established LCM (Lithography-based Ceramic Manufacturing) printer range is leading the global market of printer systems for 3D printing of advanced technical ceramics. But apart from facts and figures: what does it look like to work in one of the most innovative ceramic application labs existing? What is necessary to “rewrite the rules of ceramics” each and every day? Christian Mendieta Teran, application engineer at Lithoz headquarters in Vienna, tells his story.

An Application Engineer for Lithoz for several years by now, Christian knows Lithoz materials and printers like the back of his hand. He stands in one of Lithoz’s laboratories in the centre of Vienna where a couple of LCM 3D printers are queued up against the wall, with printed samples laid out on a benchtop and a meeting room located at the back of the facility. On his typical day at work, persistently shifting forward the boundaries of the imaginable step by step, or better micron per micron, he moves back and forth between printers and benchtop. Although to on a couple of usually NDA-protected, highly confidential development projects, he receives new inputs from customers, researchers and of course also from Lithoz material engineers in the same building.

From adapting a part’s design to making it ready for LCM printing and the part’s optimized arrangement on the build platform for serial production over the cleaning of the green part to thermal post-processing including debinding and sintering: Christian’s and his working mates’ detailed expertise of creating the future generation of ceramic applications is vast. And it is not uncommon that the limits of what is currently regarded as the very edge of the achievable are again moved forward.

Of course, it is not only about tearing down barriers. The most typical day Christian can think of starts with a routine email check to see if there’s any important requests to take care of immediately. Next, it’s time to cast an eye over the print jobs that have been running overnight to make sure everything has ran smoothly. If a print job has gone to plan, then the post-processing steps kick in, before inspections are carried out and the part is taken to the relevant meeting. These meetings could include internal or external colleagues, with the Lithoz application development team regularly printing samples for marketing and prototype iterations for customers.

“Usually, we are contacted to solve one of the following challenges: either the realization of a next-generation ceramic application with a highly complex design is limited by traditional manufacturing methods, or the performance of an application made of metal is limited by the material. People then approach LCM printing because it is simply able to tackle both these challenges. My job then is to support both, potential and existing customers to get an application or a function of the parts that wish using our technology,” Christian explains. “So, it sometimes ends up in an educational process to support them in getting into serial production. In other cases it is the management of expectations in order to optimise what their requirements are, to match expectations with possibilities of our technology. We have to communicate, inform and show what LCM printers are capable of. If there is a part geometry that the customer wishes to produce, we help and support. We also give advice about which ceramic material is better suited for their part and function. That’s why we have to communicate a lot with them.”

With his hands having touched hundreds of fascinating ceramic applications, each with the potential to disrupt today’s industrial reality, of course we had to ask Christian the question of all questions: which of the many parts has been the most fascinating of all? Christian smiles: “That is so hard to say. Let’s say out of my personal top 10, I am not allowed to reveal any detail about nine of them. Definitely my favorite among those I am allowed to talk about, are the patient-specific bioceramic implants made from hydroxy apatite or from fully bioresorbable TCP. Isn’t this just mind-blowing?: Patients receive individually manufactured implants which are then slowly resorbed by the human body and are eventually replaced by new bone!”

“Of course, any job has its routines”, Christian reflects on this short chat at the coffee machine. But then - with this slightly mysterious sparkle in his eyes - he concludes: “But there’s really some truth in that: as a ceramic application engineer at Lithoz, I get the chance to rewrite the rules of ceramics, day by day!”

Pictures:

Christian Mendieta Teran standing in front of a Lithoz 3D printer at Lithoz GmbH in Vienna.

Christian Mendieta Terán

Application Engineer at Lithoz

Vienna, Austria

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-mendieta-ter%C3%A1n/

E-Mail: cmendietateran@lithoz.com