Different from clay and silica based traditional ceramics, advanced ceramics (or modern ceramics, technical ceramics) are used in diverse industrial applications due to their superior mechanical properties, corrosion/oxidation resistance, or electrical, optical, and/or magnetic properties, as a result of their chemical composition and micro-structures.

Advanced ceramics are usually associated with “mixed” bonding—a combination of covalent, ionic, and sometimes metallic, the majority of which are compounds of metals or metalloids and nonmetals, e.g., oxides, nitrides, and carbides.

Alumina Ceramics

Alumina Ceramics is the most widely used advanced ceramic material. Owing to its highly strong ionic inter-atomic bonding, alumina offers good performance in terms of chemical and thermal stability, relatively good strength, thermal and electrical insulation characteristics at a reasonable price. With a range of purities and also the relatively low cost in raw material production it is possible to utilize alumina for wide ranging applications across a variety of different industries at reasonable prices.

Zirconia Oxide Ceramics

CeramicsZirconia can be an ideal material of high-strength and high-toughness when proper compositions, such as: magnesium oxide (MgO), yttrium oxide, (Y₂O₃), or calcium oxide (CaO), are added to control an otherwise destructive phase transformation. The micro structural features of zirconia ceramics also make it an engineering material choice of wear and corrosion resistance, damage and degradation tolerance in a wide range of applications.

Silicon Carbide Ceramics

Silicon carbide is notable for its hardness, high melting-point and high thermal conductivity. It can retains its strength at temperature as high as 1400 ⁰C and offers excellent wear resistance and thermal shock resistance.

It has well-established and wide-spread industrial applications as catalyst supports and hot-gas or molten metal filters because of its low thermal-expansion coefficient and good thermal-shock resistance as well as excellent mechanical and chemical stability at elevated temperature environments.

Cordierite Ceramics

Cordierite has a superior thermal shock resistance due to their intrinsic low coefficient of thermal expansion (CET), coupled with relatively high refractoriness and high chemical stability. Therefore, it is often used as high temperature industrial applications, such as: heat exchangers for gas turbine engines; honeycomb-shaped catalyst carriers in automobile exhaust system.

Mullite Ceramics

Mullite occurs very rarely in nature because it only forms at high temperature, low pressure conditions, so as an industrial mineral, mullite has to be supplied by synthetic alternatives.

Mullite is a strong candidate material for advanced ceramics in industrial process for its favourable thermal and mechanica properties: low thermal expansion, low thermal conductivity, excellent creep resistance, suitable high temperature strength and outstanding stability under harsh chemical environments.