Recent Developments and Applications of Fine Ceramics in China

Introduction Over the last twenty years, a great advancement in knowledge and technique for fine ceramics has been made in China. Although there is a long history of creating traditional ceramic and its culture in venerable china, the research and production of advanced ceramics on a large scale was started merely from 70th of last century. By now, there are more than 100 universities and research institutions, and over 20000 researchers (include the graduate student) engage in this career. There is over 4000 [1,6] companies manufacturing the products related to the fine ceramics. The ceramic goods cover a large scope of application in information technology, health and biotechnology transportation, energy and environment, security and even in space flight. Research supported by government As that occurred worldwide in 80th last century, the Chinese government put a large fund into the research and development of ceramic heat engine. Though the ceramic engine not succeeds, it has attracted attention of large numbers of scientists in metallic materials science, chemistry and physics in the ceramic research, for powder synthesis, ceramic processing, structure and properties characterization, and made a remarkable progress in the R&D of advanced ceramics. Now, the ceramic researches are supported in several nation plan as: 863, 973, NSFC etc. As shown in Fig. 1, the fund supported by Chinese government (ministry of science and technology) for the applied research of advanced ceramics increased in the early 90th of last century and than decreased due to the failure of the heat engine project, but it quickly increased recently owing to fast growth of the economy. Fig. 2 shows the basic research supported by National Science Foundation of China. It is seen that the fund for functional ceramics has been higher than that of structural. The growth of the fund is also fast lately. Activities of the Research and Development The researches for functional ceramics are focused on: (1) dielectric, ferroelectric and piezoelectric ceramics for information technology and the advanced device process. (2) nano materials, (3) MEMS, (4) photoelectric ceramic materials and its application, (5) fine powder synthesis, (6) design and computation etc. The state key Lab. of fine ceramics and new processing at Tsinghua University leads the research in china. The structural ceramic research is focused on the low cost and high reliability of the ceramic parts: (1) low cost, high quality ceramic powder synthesis technology (Si3N4, SiC, ZrO2, etc), (2) low cost …