Structural Design of Ceramic Materials and Ceramic-Based Composites

Dear Colleagues,

Ceramic materials and composites based on them have a wide range of applications, from medicine to aircraft construction. Ceramics are characterized by high strength, resistance to various operating conditions, a high melting point, and chemical inertness. However, at the same time, ceramics have a low tolerance for defects, which significantly reduces their reliability. It is known that the use of complex modern approaches to the formation of materials, which can be combined under the term "structural design" can achieve multiple increases in performance in materials of known composition. Thus, it has been shown that:

• Multicomponent solid solutions based on metal borides and carbides have a significantly higher resistance to oxidation, hardness, and fracture toughness compared to binary carbides and borides.
• Providing weak bonds in ceramic composites with high-modulus matrix and low-modulus inclusions creates good conditions for crack bifurcation, leading to an increase in fracture toughness.
• The organization of a multilevel pore structure is capable of endowing otherwise bioinert oxide ceramics with osteoconductive properties, etc.

I am pleased to invite you to publish research works aimed at studying approaches to controlling the performance characteristics of ceramics and ceramic-based materials through structure and composition, devoted to the research of physical laws that determine the increase in characteristics or endowing the material with fundamentally new properties at various levels of the structural hierarchy from the nano- to macro-range.

We are looking forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Ales Buyakov
Guest Editor

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