Electroceramic Materials: Composition–Structure–Property Relationships

Dear Colleagues,

Electroceramics include advanced ceramic materials that have interesting and useful electrical, optical, and magnetic properties that are applied in a wide variety of applications. Their unique properties have gained increasing importance in many technologies including communications, energy conversion and storage, electronics, and automation. This growing field includes dielectric, piezoelectric, ferroelectric, multiferroic, ionically conducting, semiconducting, and superconducting ceramics used in different domains such as consumer electronics, medicine and health, power engineering, or communication. Many of the electroceramic materials are inorganic solids (polycrystalline oxides) with potential electrical properties. Properties depend on the stoichiometry but also on the overall crystal and defect structures of the solids, as well as on interfacial effects. For this purpose, the preparation of the material using different synthesis methodologies, if this is possible at low temperatures, as well as the use of different techniques such as spark plasma sintering, flash sintering, or cold sintering, for its processing, is one of the most important aspects to obtain good materials and to find more advanced electroceramics. Thus, obtaining high-quality electroceramic materials involves being able to understand and optimise the composition–structure–property relationship.

This Special Issue will be an interesting interdisciplinary medium to collect research and contributions of recent advances, covering fundamental aspects of electroceramic materials: from synthesis and processing to properties. The recent advances included in this issue will be of interest to researchers and students working in this field. Therefore, I invite you to contribute papers in this growing and interesting area.

Dr. Héctor Beltrán-Mir
Guest Editor

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• low-temperature processing
• sintering of electroceramic materials
• field-assisted sintering
• local structure
• impedance spectroscopy
• thin films
• dielectrics
• thermistors
• lead-free piezoelectrics
• electronic conductors
• ferroelectrics
• ionic conductors