Fabricating dense, complex-shaped items from silicon carbide can be challenging due to the material’s properties. Manufacturers benefit from studies on reducing viscosity of SiC slurries, such as two recent ones published in an ACerS journal, but open access to the data behind such studies may benefit them even more.
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Perovskite solar cells are expected to become a leading contender to silicon-based solar cells, or for use in tandem with them, once several challenges are overcome. Researchers at Brown University found cracks in perovskite films are easily healed by applying compression or moderate heat.
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Porous ceramics hold great promise as value-added products for waste materials because they can use ceramic and glass powders as starting materials. Two recent papers published in a special issue of ACT explore this idea by creating foam glass from waste.
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Eutectic materials self-assemble to form a cohesive structure, but only a limited set of structures emerge. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Michigan found they could achieve new microstructures through templating.
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A whole slate of startup companies are raising millions of dollars in funding to support their missions to extract resources from space—but is mining the moon for rare earth elements even feasible?
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To improve ceramic devices, one factor ceramists and ceramic engineers consider is the strength of ceramic bonds. Two recent papers published in an ACerS journal explore ways to improve ceramic bonds in different applications.
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Decarbonizing manufacturing processes is a focus of the ceramic industry. In a recent paper, researchers performed a techno-economic analysis to show how the cold sintering process, a recently developed manufacturing technique, could help reach this goal.
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To reduce carbon emissions from cement manufacturing, emission-heavy steps of the process can be replaced with alternative techniques. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology experimented with using electrolysis to create cement and found that in addition to reducing carbon emissions, byproducts from the process can be reused.
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Thermal barrier coatings protect equipment against high temperatures in steel production. Researchers from Bartin University in Turkey found ferrochromium slag, a waste product from stainless steel production, could be used to create such coatings.
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Both glass and ceramics can be quite brittle. Two recent studies look at increasing the ductility of each—one through the consolidation of glassy nanoparticles, and the other through flash sintering.
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