INTACT: Intrinsically Tough and Affordable Ceramics Today

Structural applications demand materials with a unique combination of properties including high strength, stiffness, environmental resistance, and fracture toughness. As a class of materials, ceramics generally outperform metal alloys in all these properties except fracture toughness.

The inherent lack of toughness in ceramics has prevented their use in critical structures such as airframes, turbine disks, ground vehicle chassis, or submarine hulls. This is unfortunate as structural ceramics have the potential to be 10x stronger than metals, twice as stiff, half as dense, and capable of operating at 2x higher temperatures and in corrosive environments. If metal-like fracture toughness could be engineered into bulk ceramics it would open a new class of structural materials that far exceed the capability of the most advanced metallic alloys.

The INTACT Disruption Opportunity will explore new approaches to produce tough monolithic ceramic materials. In contrast to fiber reinforcement strategies employed in ceramic matrix composites, INTACT is focused on atomistic scale toughening mechanisms that afford ceramics with the ductile characteristics of metallic systems. This intrinsic toughening approach is distinct from the extrinsic strategies employed in composites where only quasi-ductility is achieved.

Of particular interest on INTACT is the application of emerging non-equilibrium processing techniques to engineer defects (e.g., vacancies, dislocations, phase and grain boundaries) into ceramic materials to accommodate fine-scale plastic deformation.

The introduction of mechanical work (akin to forging) and rapid thermal quench rates accessible via laser, electron beam, and other far-from-equilibrium processing techniques opens new possibilities to create radically new ceramic microstructures that may enable breakthroughs in bulk fracture toughness levels while maintaining an impressive balance of properties.