Novel Ceramic Microstructures and Nanostructures from Advanced Processing

Abstract

The study of ceramic microstructures is necessary to identify and understand the mechanisms that operate to produce a ceramic material with physical and mechanical properties tailored for a particular application.1,2 The recent emphasis on sol-gel preprocessing to obtain the highly pure and uniformly fine particle powders3–7 needed for the production of high green densities has become known as the study of nanostructures. Where microstructures describe the domain of grains, grain boundaries, porosity and their interactions, nanostructures describe the state within each individual grain, particle, whisker or fiber, and the interrelationships of these finer structures. As the technological needs for finer ceramic microstructures (≤10 μm grain sizes) increase, it becomes increasingly important to characterize and understand the grain substructures or nanostructures. The size of the nanostructures in these fine-grained materials is on the order of a few nanometers (nm) to several thousand nm.