Inside BJS Ceramics' EIC Accelerator Project on Silicon Carbide

BJS Ceramics GmbH, a small company in Gersthofen near Augsburg, set out to do something no European firm had done: make silicon carbide (SiC) fibres, the reinforcement inside the ceramic composites that let jet engines run hotter, on an industrial scale. In the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, the European Commission selected its project SPE, "Silicon-Carbide-Fiber Pilot-production in Europe", according to the EC list of selected companies. The EU contributed €2.5 million to a total cost of €4,208,750, from 1 July 2019 to 31 December 2021, according to CORDIS. The company's final report says the pilot production was established and the first SiC fibres ever made in the EU were tested. The step it promised next, a commercial fibre plant "in the mid-2020ies", has not been announced.

The company is active. Its register file shows a capital increase on 20 March 2026 and annual accounts for 2024 published in November 2025, according to North Data, and its website lists its fibres, its sister company and a production address in Bayreuth.

Where BJS Ceramics Stands Now

BJS Ceramics still describes itself as a developer and producer of non-oxide ceramic fibres and runs alongside BJS Composites GmbH, which makes ceramic matrix composite (CMC) parts under the Keraman brand at the same Gersthofen address, according to its company page. The page names Armin Bruch and Dr Werner Humbs as managing directors, matching the directors recorded in the register since 2015 on North Data. The company holds DIN EN ISO 9001:2015 and EN 9100:2018 certificates, the second being the quality standard for aerospace suppliers, and lists mobility, space, energy, defence and water management as markets.

Its most recent public research project is HärPy, which ran from 1 November 2023 to 31 October 2025 with BJS Ceramics as coordinator and the Fraunhofer Center HTL as partner, funded by the Bavarian economy ministry with €200,000 for Fraunhofer's share, according to Fraunhofer HTL. Its goals were faster throughput "while maintaining the highest fiber qualities and industry-standard reject rates", better curing and pyrolysis, and more automation. Those are the problems of a line still being tuned at pilot scale, two years after SPE ended.

Revenue, staff and results are not public. North Data holds BJS Ceramics' balance sheets from 2014 to 2024 behind a paywall, and no free source for the figures was found. The register dates show that the accounts for 2022 were published in June 2025 and those for 2023 in February 2025. Dealroom puts the headcount at 11 to 50, a band that could not be checked against a filing.

The Technology: A Different Route to the Fibre

SiC fibres are woven into preforms and embedded in a silicon carbide matrix to make SiC/SiC composites. These parts are about a third of the weight of nickel superalloys and survive temperatures that would melt them, so engines built with them can burn hotter and more efficiently. The CORDIS summary gives the heat resistance as 260°C higher than nickel-based superalloys. When SPE was proposed, there were "only 2 SiC fiber producers in Japan" and one plant under construction in the United States "in close cooperation with the US Air Force", and the fibres are dual-use goods under export control, the project objective says.

BJS Ceramics was set up in 2014 to take over the SiC fibre business and technology of SGL Carbon, according to Dealroom and the company profile on Composites United; the register entry dates from 5 November 2014. The established fibres are spun from polycarbosilane. BJS Ceramics has developed a process that starts from polysilanes instead, according to Fraunhofer HTL, and holds German and international patents on chlorine-free preceramic polymers and high-molecular polysilanes, filed from 2014 and listed on North Data. The company's final EU report claims its route "requires less production steps, delivers higher yields at less energy input" than its overseas competitors. No independent comparison of cost or fibre properties was found. On Bayern Innovativ, the company also markets fibres with "programmable functionalities" for low-observability military uses, rocket propulsion and nuclear fission and fusion components.

What SPE Promised, and What the Record Shows

The proposal assumed the technology would reach TRL 4 to 5 by the end of 2018 and that "in 2019, the first European SiC fiber line in Bayreuth will start production", according to CORDIS. The building for that line, a fibre pilot plant owned by the Fraunhofer Center HTL, opened on 12 April 2019 at a cost of €20 million, with BJS Ceramics named as the first industry partner on the non-oxide line, according to the Fraunhofer press release. Fraunhofer's director told the trade journal cfi that the first line would go into operation at the end of 2019, with each line able to make "several tonnes per year". The two sources differ on the building's usable area: 1,500 m² in the press release, 2,000 m² in the cfi article.

BJS Ceramics began producing SiC fibres on the pilot line in February 2021, according to a company profile published by Composites United, and its own history dates the launch of the Silafil F fibre to 2021. That is roughly a year and a half after the proposal's 2019 target. The company's announcement of the grant gave the project period as July 2019 to June 2021; CORDIS records the end as 31 December 2021, six months later.

The final periodic report, covering July 2020 to December 2021, lists five results: the upscaling of the raw material supply on the basis of BJS patents, the transfer of the process from lab scale to the industrial pilot line, a quality management system, successful processing tests of the first EU-made fibres by BJS Composites, and contacts with "several EU and oversea's key players" that led to "first shipments". It names no customer and gives no production volume. CORDIS lists no deliverables or publications for the project.

1. Start up the Bayreuth pilot productionDeliveredProduction from February 2021, per Composites United and the final report.
2. Production starts in 2019MissedFirst fibres in 2021; project extended by six months.
3. Quality system and raw material supplyDeliveredReported by the company; EN 9100 certificate shown on its website.
4. Meet aviation customers' requirements by end of 2022Not verifiedNo customer qualification announced; ITP Aero invested in 2023.
5. Commercial fibre plant in the mid-2020sNot achievedNo plant announced; 2023 to 2025 work still at pilot scale.

The EC list names BJS Ceramics alone for SPE. CORDIS records BJS Composites GmbH, at the same address, as a linked third party that received €15,837 of the grant.

The Investor and the Money

In April 2023 ITP Aero, the aero-engine component maker based near Bilbao, bought about 10% of BJS Ceramics, and the two agreed to develop next-generation ceramic fibres and CMC components for aero-engines together, with "a secure all-European supply-chain", according to the company's announcement, which the Bavarian aerospace cluster bavAIRia and Composites United published. The price and other terms were kept confidential. No supply contract, engine programme or CMC part from the partnership has been made public since.

The register shows the money side only in outline. The share capital, €120,000 since March 2015, rose to €133,185 in April 2023, the month of the ITP Aero deal, then to €136,363 in July 2023, €142,045 in June 2025 and €157,670 in March 2026, according to North Data. Each increase means new shares were issued, but how much investors paid for them, and who the six shareholders North Data counts are, is not public without a paid record.

Before and around the EIC grant, BJS Ceramics relied on public research money. It was a partner with the Fraunhofer Center HTL and MTU Aero Engines in SiCTec3, a €3.2 million Bavarian project from July 2015 to March 2019 that took the polysilane route to TRL 4, according to Fraunhofer HTL. It was a partner in TRANSFER, an EIT RawMaterials project led by Fraunhofer from January 2020 to December 2022 to prepare the commercialisation of SiC fibres, according to EIT RawMaterials. North Data also lists a federal grant of €661,243 from November 2018 for CMC_TraTurb, on CMC structures for gas turbines. SPE is the only project of the company on CORDIS. The EIC Fund made no investment: the award was a grant, and the company is not among the 301 organisations on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies.

Why Europe Should Care

SiC fibres sit where several EU priorities meet: cleaner aviation, hydrogen-ready turbines, fusion, and defence materials that today come from Japan and the United States under export licences. The Commission's February 2024 communication on advanced materials for industrial leadership names reducing dependencies on critical materials, and materials for planes, space launchers and dual-use and defence equipment, as reasons to act. A European fibre source is exactly the kind of capability that policy describes, and the €20 million that German federal and Bavarian budgets and Fraunhofer put into the Bayreuth plant shows public money has already been committed to it.

The Verdict