Application Obstacles and Development Prospects of Fine Ceramic Materials

The superior performance of fine ceramics is of great significance to the improvement of the performance of weapons and equipment. It has become an inevitable trend in the development of weapons and equipment to speed up the application of fine ceramics in weapons and equipment and expand its scope of use. However, the expensive machining cost and low reliability have become the “bottleneck” that restricts the application of fine ceramics in weapons and equipment. Therefore, in order to realize the practical and popularization of ceramics in weapons and equipment, the key is to improve the reliability of the use of ceramics and reduce their machining costs.

In order to realize the practical application and popularization of engineering ceramics, countries all over the world have invested a lot of manpower, material resources and financial resources in research, among which the most representative is the United States. The United States has implemented a 5-year low-cost ceramics program for heat engines since 1993, researching and developing advanced ceramic preparation processes and quality control techniques to reduce the cost of ceramic components by more than an order of magnitude while improving quality and performance . Since 2000, the United States has implemented a 20-year American advanced ceramic development plan, which aims to organically combine basic research, application development and product use, and strive to make fine ceramics by 2020. Ceramics can become an economical and reliable material of choice, and are widely used in industrial manufacturing, aviation, aerospace, military and consumer goods manufacturing.

After half a century of development, the performance of ceramics has been significantly improved, and the machining cost has dropped significantly. In order to solve the brittleness problem of fine ceramics, various toughening and strengthening measures such as fiber toughening, whisker toughening, phase transformation toughening, synergistic toughening and particle strengthening have been proposed successively, and many beneficial research results have been achieved. In particular, the wide application of nanotechnology has greatly improved the strength, toughness and superplasticity of ceramic materials, opening up new fields for the application of fine ceramics. In addition, inspired by natural biological materials such as shells, bamboo, and bones, people have proposed the concept of biomimetic structure design, providing a new research and design idea for the strengthening and toughening of ceramic materials.

As a hard and brittle material, ceramics are mainly processed by diamond grinding wheel grinding, and the machining cost accounts for 60% to 80% of the total cost of ceramic components, and some are even as high as 90%. Therefore, the key to reducing the cost of ceramic components is to reduce their machining costs. In order to reduce the machining cost of fine ceramics, on the basis of the development of traditional machining, ELID grinding, chemical machining, EDM, ultrasonic machining, laser/plasma machining, high pressure abrasive water jet machining and various composite machining processes, etc. Advanced machining methods and machining techniques have sprung up, greatly improving the machining efficiency of ceramics and reducing machining costs.