ENGINEERING MATERIALS
Topic:
Modern Ceramics and its
Properties
Submitted To:
Dr. Fazal
Karim
Submitted By:
Muhammad Qasim
Roll #: CE09-10E02
8th Semester (Evening)
Institute of Chemical Engineering & Technology,
Punjab University
Introduction to Ceramics:
A ceramic is an inorganic, nonmetallic solid prepared by the action of heat and subsequent
cooling. Ceramic materials may have a crystalline or partly crystalline structure, or may
be amorphous (e.g. glass). Because most common ceramics are crystalline, the definition of
ceramic is often restricted to inorganic crystalline materials, as opposed to the non-crystalline
glasses, a distinction followed here.
Classification of Ceramics:
For convenience, ceramic products are usually divided into four sectors; these are shown below
with some examples:
Structural, including bricks, pipes, floor and roof tiles
Refractories, such as kiln linings, gas fire radiants, steel and glass making crucibles
White wares, including tableware, cookware, wall tiles, pottery products and sanitary
ware
Technical, is also known as engineering, advanced, special, and in Japan, fine ceramics.
Such items include tiles used in the Space Shuttle program, gas burner nozzles, ballistic
protection, nuclear fuel uranium oxide pellets, biomedical implants, coatings of jet engine
turbine blades, ceramic disk brake, missile nose cones, bearing (mechanical),etc.
Frequently, the raw materials do not include clays.[6]
Classification of Modern Ceramics:
Modern ceramics can also be classified into three distinct material categories:
Oxides: alumina, beryllia, ceria, zirconia
Non-oxides: carbide, boride, nitride, silicide
Composite materials: particulate reinforced, fiber reinforced, combinations of oxides and
non-oxides.
Each one of these classes can develop unique material properties because ceramics tend to be
crystalline.
Modern Ceramics:
Until the 1950s, the most important ceramic materials were (1) pottery, bricks and tiles,
(2) cements and (3) glass. A composite material of ceramic and metal is known as cermet.
Barium titanate (often mixed with strontium titanate) displays ferro-electricity, meaning
that its mechanical, electrical, and thermal responses are coupled to one another and also
history-dependent. It is widely used in electromechanical transducers, ceramic capacitors,
and data storage elements. Grain boundary conditions can create PTC effects in heating
elements.
Bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide, a high-temperature superconductor
Boron nitride is structurally isoelectronic to carbon and takes on similar physical forms:
a graphite-like one used as a lubricant, and a diamond-like one used as an abrasive.
Earthenware used for domestic ware such as plates and mugs.
Ferrite is used in the magnetic cores of electrical transformers and magnetic core
memory.
Lead zirconate titanate (PZT) was developed at the United States National Bureau of
Standards in 1954. PZT is used as an ultrasonic transducer, as its piezoelectric properties
greatly exceed those of Rochelle salt.
Magnesium di-boride (MgB2) is an unconventional superconductor.
Porcelain is used for a wide range of household and industrial products.
Sialon (Silicon Aluminium Oxynitride) has high strength; resistance to thermal shock,
chemical and wear resistance, and low density. These ceramics are used in non-ferrous
molten metal handling, weld pins and the chemical industry.
Silicon carbide (SiC) is used as a susceptor in microwave furnaces, a commonly used
abrasive, and as a refractory material.
Silicon nitride (Si3N4) is used as an abrasive powder.
Steatite (magnesium silicates) is used as an electrical insulator.
Titanium carbide Used in space shuttle re-entry shields and scratchproof watches.
Uranium oxide (UO2), used as fuel in nuclear reactors.
Yttrium barium copper oxide (YBa2Cu3O7-x), another high temperature superconductor.
Zinc oxide (ZnO), which is a semiconductor, and used in the construction of varistors.
Zirconium dioxide (zirconia), which in pure form undergoes many phase
changes between room temperature and practical sintering temperatures, can be chemically
"stabilized" in several different forms. Its high oxygen ion conductivity recommends it for use
in fuel cells and automotive oxygen sensors. In another variant, metastable structures can
impart transformation toughening for mechanical applications; most ceramic knife blades
are made of this material.
Partially stabilised zirconia (PSZ) is much less brittle than other ceramics and is used for
metal forming tools, valves and liners, abrasive slurries, kitchen knives and bearings subject
to severe abrasion.
Properties of Modern Ceramics:
There are many important properties of modern ceramics but some them are
discussed her which are as follows:
The physical properties of any ceramic substance are a direct result of its crystalline structure
and chemical composition. Solid state chemistry reveals the fundamental connection between
microstructure and properties such as localized density variations, grain size distribution, type of
porosity and second-phase content, which can all be correlated with ceramic properties such as
mechanical strength by the Hall-Petch equation, hardness, toughness, dielectric constant, and
the optical properties exhibited by transparent materials.
Physical properties of chemical compounds which provide evidence of chemical composition
include odor, color, volume, density (mass / volume), melting point, boiling point, heat capacity,
physical form at room temperature (solid, liquid or gas), hardness, porosity, and index of
refraction.
Mechanical properties:
Mechanical properties are important in structural and building materials as well as textile fabrics.
They include the many properties used to describe the strength of materials such
as: elasticity / plasticity, tensile strength, compressive strength, shear strength, fracture
toughness & ductility (low in brittle materials), and indentation hardness.
Fracture mechanics is the field of mechanics concerned with the study of the formation and
subsequent propagation of micro-cracks in materials. It uses methods of analytical solid
mechanics to calculate the thermodynamic driving force on a crack and the methods of
experimental solid mechanics to characterize the material's resistance to fracture and
catastrophic failure.
In modern materials science, fracture mechanics is an important tool in improving the
mechanical performance of materials and components. It applies
the physics of stress and strain, in particular the theories of elasticity and plasticity, to the
microscopic crystallographic defects found in real materials in order to predict the macroscopic
mechanical failure of bodies. Fractography is widely used with fracture mechanics to understand
the causes of failures and also verify the theoretical failure predictions with real life failures.
Thus, since cracks and other microstructural defects can lower the strength of a structure
beyond that which might be predicted by the theory of crystalline objects, a different property of
the materialabove and beyond conventional strengthis needed to describe the fracture
resistance of engineering materials. This is the reason for the need for fracture mechanics: the
evaluation of the strength of flawed structures.
In this context, Fracture toughness is a property which describes the ability of a material
containing a crack to resist fracture, and is one of the most important properties of any material
for virtually all design applications. Fracture toughness is a quantitative way of expressing a
material's resistance to brittle fracture when a crack is present. If a material has a large value of
fracture toughness it will probably undergo ductile fracture. Brittle fracture is very characteristic
of materials with a low fracture toughness value. Fracture mechanics, which leads to the
concept of fracture toughness, was largely based on the work of A. A. Griffith who, amongst
other things, studied the behavior of cracks in brittle materials. This describes "ceramics are
strong in compression and weak in tension"
Ceramic materials are usually ionic or covalent bonded materials, and can be crystalline or
amorphous. A material held together by either type of bond will tend to fracture before
any plastic deformation takes place, which results in poor toughness in these materials.
Additionally, because these materials tend to be porous, the pores and other microscopic
imperfections act as stress concentrators, decreasing the toughness further, and reducing
the tensile strength. These combine to give catastrophic failures, as opposed to the normally
much more gentle failure modes of metals.
These materials do show plastic deformation. However, due to the rigid structure of the
crystalline materials, there are very few available slip systems for dislocations to move, and so
they deform very slowly. With the non-crystalline (glassy) materials, viscous flow is the dominant
source of plastic deformation, and is also very slow. It is therefore neglected in many
applications of ceramic materials.
To overcome the brittle behavior, ceramic material development has introduced the class of
ceramic matrix composite materials, in which ceramic fibers are embedded and with specific
coatings are forming fiber bridges across any crack. This mechanism substantially increases the
fracture toughness of such ceramics. The ceramic disc brakes are, for example using a ceramic
matrix composite material manufactured with a specific process.
Electrical properties:
Semiconductors:
Some ceramics are semiconductors. Most of these are transition metal oxides that are II-VI
semiconductors, such as zinc oxide.
While there are prospects of mass-producing blue LEDs from zinc oxide, ceramicists are most
interested in the electrical properties that show grain boundary effects.
One of the most widely used of these is the varistor. These are devices that exhibit the property
that resistance drops sharply at a certain threshold voltage. Once the voltage across the device
reaches the threshold, there is a breakdown of the electrical structure in the vicinity of the grain
boundaries, which results in its electrical resistance dropping from several meg-ohms down to a
few hundred ohms. The major advantage of these is that they can dissipate a lot of energy, and
they self-reset after the voltage across the device drops below the threshold, its resistance
returns to being high.
This makes them ideal for surge-protection applications; as there is control over the threshold
voltage and energy tolerance, they find use in all sorts of applications. The best demonstration
of their ability can be found in electrical substations, where they are employed to protect the
infrastructure from lightning strikes. They have rapid response, are low maintenance, and do not
appreciably degrade from use, making them virtually ideal devices for this application.
Semiconducting ceramics are also employed as gas sensors. When various gases are passed
over a polycrystalline ceramic, its electrical resistance changes. With tuning to the possible gas
mixtures, very inexpensive devices can be produced.
Superconductivity:
Under some conditions, such as extremely low temperature, some ceramics exhibit high
temperature superconductivity. The exact reason for this is not known, but there are two major
families of superconducting ceramics.
Ferro-electricity and supersets:
Piezoelectricity, a link between electrical and mechanical response, is exhibited by a large
number of ceramic materials, including the quartz used to measure time in watches and other
electronics. Such devices use both properties of piezo-electrics, using electricity to produce a
mechanical motion (powering the device) and then using this mechanical motion to produce
electricity (generating a signal). The unit of time measured is the natural interval required for
electricity to be converted into mechanical energy and back again.
The piezoelectric effect is generally stronger in materials that also exhibit pyro-electricity, and all
pyro-electric materials are also piezoelectric. These materials can be used to inter convert
between thermal, mechanical, or electrical energy; for instance, after synthesis in a furnace, a
pyro-electric crystal allowed to cool under no applied stress generally builds up a static charge
of thousands of volts. Such materials are used in motion sensors, where the tiny rise in
temperature from a warm body entering the room is enough to produce a measurable voltage in
the crystal.
In turn, pyro-electricity is seen most strongly in materials which also display the ferroelectric
effect, in which a stable electric dipole can be oriented or reversed by applying an electrostatic
field. Pyro-electricity is also a necessary consequence of ferro-electricity. This can be used to
store information in ferroelectric capacitors, elements of ferroelectric RAM.
The most common such materials are lead zirconate titanate and barium titanate. Aside from
the uses mentioned above, their strong piezoelectric response is exploited in the design of highfrequency loudspeakers, transducers for sonar, and actuators for atomic force and scanning
tunneling microscopes.
Positive thermal coefficient:
Increases in temperature can cause grain boundaries to suddenly become insulating in some
semiconducting ceramic materials, mostly mixtures of heavy metal titanates. The critical
transition temperature can be adjusted over a wide range by variations in chemistry. In such
materials, current will pass through the material until joule heating brings it to the transition
temperature, at which point the circuit will be broken and current flow will cease. Such ceramics
are used as self-controlled heating elements in, for example, the rear-window defrost circuits of
automobiles.
At the transition temperature, the material's dielectric response becomes theoretically infinite.
While a lack of temperature control would rule out any practical use of the material near its
critical temperature, the dielectric effect remains exceptionally strong even at much higher
temperatures. Titanates with critical temperatures far below room temperature have become
synonymous with "ceramic" in the context of ceramic capacitors for just this reason.
Optical properties:
Optically transparent materials focus on the response of a material to incoming light waves of a
range of [Link] selective optical filters can be utilized to alter or enhance the
brightness and contrast of a digital image. Guided light wave transmission via frequency
selective waveguides involves the emerging field of fiber optics and the ability of certain glassy
compositions as a transmission medium for a range of frequencies simultaneously (multi-mode
optical fiber) with little or no interference between competing wavelengths or frequencies.
This resonant mode of energy and data transmission via electromagnetic (light) wave
propagation, though low powered, is virtually lossless. Optical waveguides are used as
components in integrated optical circuits (e.g. light-emitting diodes, LEDs) or as the
transmission medium in local and long haul optical communication systems. Also of value to the
emerging materials scientist is the sensitivity of materials to radiation in the thermal infrared (IR)
portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This heat-seeking ability is responsible for such
diverse optical phenomena as Night-vision and IR luminescence.
Thus, there is an increasing need in the military sector for high-strength, robust materials which
have the capability to transmit light (electromagnetic waves) in the visible (0.4 0.7
micrometers) and mid-infrared (1 5 micrometers) regions of the spectrum. These materials are
needed for applications requiring transparent armor, including next-generation highspeed missiles and pods, as well as protection against improvised explosive devices (IED).
In the 1960s, scientists at General Electric (GE) discovered that under the right manufacturing
conditions, some ceramics, especially aluminum oxide (alumina), could be made translucent.
These translucent materials were transparent enough to be used for containing the electrical
plasma generated in high-pressure sodium street lamps. During the past two decades,
additional types of transparent ceramics have been developed for applications such as nose
cones for heat-seeking missiles, windows for fighter aircraft, and scintillation counters for
computed tomography scanners.
In the early 1970s, Thomas Soules pioneered computer modeling of light transmission through
translucent ceramic alumina. His model showed that microscopic pores in ceramic, mainly
trapped at the junctions of microcrystalline grains, caused light to scatter and prevented true
transparency. The volume fraction of these microscopic pores had to be less than 1% for highquality optical transmission.
This is basically a particle size effect. Opacity results from the incoherent scattering of light at
surfaces and interfaces. In addition to pores, most of the interfaces in a typical metal or ceramic
object are in the form of grain boundaries which separate tiny regions of crystalline order. When
the size of the scattering center (or grain boundary) is reduced below the size of the wavelength
of the light being scattered, the scattering no longer occurs to any significant extent.
In the formation of polycrystalline materials (metals and ceramics) the size of the crystalline
grains is determined largely by the size of the crystalline particles present in the raw material
during formation (or pressing) of the object. Moreover, the size of the grain boundaries scales
directly with particle size. Thus a reduction of the original particle size below the wavelength of
visible light (~ 0.5 micrometers for shortwave violet) eliminates any light scattering, resulting in a
transparent material.
Recently, Japanese scientists have developed techniques to produce ceramic parts that rival
the transparency of traditional crystals (grown from a single seed) and exceed the fracture
toughness of a single crystal. In particular, scientists at the Japanese firm Konoshima Ltd., a
producer of ceramic construction materials and industrial chemicals, have been looking for
markets for their transparent ceramics.
Livermore researchers realized that these ceramics might greatly benefit high-powered lasers
used in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) Programs Directorate. In particular, a Livermore
research team began to acquire advanced transparent ceramics from Konoshima to determine if
they could meet the optical requirements needed for Livermores Solid-State Heat Capacity
Laser (SSHCL). Livermore researchers have also been testing applications of these materials
for applications such as advanced drivers for laser-driven fusion power plants.
