[Image above] The bags given to Ceramics Expo 2025 attendees recognized the conference’s 10th anniversary. Credit: ACerS
Spring is a time for new beginnings, which makes it the perfect season to discuss emerging trends transforming the ceramics industry at the annual Ceramics Expo.
Ceramics Expo is the leading annual supply chain exhibition and conference for the advanced ceramic and glass industry. This year’s event took place April 29–30 at the Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi, Mich. It kicked off Monday night with a VIP networking event, followed by two days of exhibiting and conference talks that ran alongside the co-located Thermal Management Expo.
As the milestone 10th anniversary of this conference, the presentations and panel discussions at Ceramics Expo 2025 focused largely on market factors that have shaped the ceramic and glass industry over the past decade. Sessions on sensor miniaturization, high-temperature materials fabrication and application, and scale-up of ceramic additive manufacturing processes helped first-time attendees appreciate some of the key challenges facing the industry today.
These sessions also made it evident, however, the increasing urgency to develop solutions to some of these challenges—such as raw material supply chains, the lifeblood of manufacturing.
Many critical minerals are “asymmetric commodities,” a term American Element CEO Michael Silver uses to describe the concentration of critical mineral deposits or processing facilities in a single nation. Such concentrated production gives that nation significant control over pricing, and as discussed in the first two presentations of the conference, the recent tariff actions taken by the U.S. government have revealed the significant economic impacts of upsetting this delicate market balance.
The second presentation on the first morning of Ceramics Expo 2025 focused on shoring up resilience in the technical ceramics supply chain. It was moderated by Keith DeCarlo of Blasch Precision Ceramics (left) and featured insights from Jose Martin of Allied Mineral Products (center) and Claire Theron of STC, a unit of IDEX Corporation (right). Credit: ACerS
As a result, innovations in materials and processing methods can help address supply chain challenges by shifting reliance away from critical minerals toward more accessible materials and reducing waste during production, for example.
To showcase some of these developments, Ceramics Expo 2025 included a new Solutions Innovation Stage alongside the main conference presentations. This stage featured expert-led discussions and technical presentations on some cutting-edge products and solutions by several leading ceramic suppliers and manufacturers, such as Fabric8Labs, Lucideon, Hindalco Industries Ltd., Uncountable Inc., and Colder Products Company and Omni Services.
The Solutions Innovations Stage offered more in-depth insights into specific products and solutions to complement the presentations on the main stage. Credit: ACerS
Of course, successfully developing such innovations requires an educated workforce, and during the ACerS Corporate Partner and Manufacturing Division breakfast on Wednesday, Robocasting Enterprises founder and president Joe Cesarano reported on a survey that ACerS is conducting to better understand the industry’s most pressing workforce needs. The results of that survey are planned for release later this year.
During the ACerS Corporate Partner and Manufacturing Division breakfast, the John E. Marquis Award was presented to postdoctoral fellow Marco Pelanconi for his paper “High-strength Si–SiC lattices prepared by powder bed fusion, infiltration-pyrolysis, and reactive silicon infiltration,” published in Journal of the American Ceramic Society. Credit: ACerS
Overall, this year’s conference served as a welcoming review of the market since the first edition in 2015. Next year, Ceramics Expo will begin the new decade with a fresh start by returning to its hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, May 5–6, 2026.
See more pictures from Ceramics Expo 2025 on the ACerS Flickr page.
