Research
Summary of Research
The research in my group is concentrated in two areas: flash sintering, and high temperature ceramic-matrix-composites from polymer derived ceramics.
Flash sintering was first discovered in our laboratory in 2010. It is being heralded as the most significant discovery in the field of Ceramics over the last twenty-five years, with both scientific and technological implications for the coming decades. The field has spread to many laboratories throughout the world, often through visitors to our laboratory who have then returned to their own institutions and established their own programs. Just recently, two very large, multiyear, multi-investigator programs have been established in Germany (Juelich) and Japan (NIMS). The science of flash sintering is highly interdisciplinary spanning across materials science, physics, electrical engineering and computer science.
There is emerging interest in using the method to process ceramics for next generation solid state Li-ion batteries, which is often not possible by conventional techniques.