High-entropy ceramics: propelling applications through disorder

TL;DR

High-entropy ceramics leverage atomic disorder to enhance properties like hardness, stability, and thermal conductivity, enabling diverse advanced applications such as coatings, catalysts, and energy systems.

Contribution

This paper reviews recent advances in high-entropy ceramics, emphasizing how disorder improves material properties and broadens application potential.

Findings

Disorder enhances hardness and yield stress through solid-solution strengthening.

Chemically disordered mixtures favor high-symmetry superlattices, increasing stability.

Force-constant disorder reduces thermal conductivity without compromising mechanical strength.

Abstract

Disorder enhances desired properties, as well as creating new avenues for synthesizing materials. For instance, hardness and yield stress are improved by solid-solution strengthening, a result of distortions and atomic size mismatches. Thermo-chemical stability is increased by the preference of chemically disordered mixtures for high-symmetry super-lattices. Vibrational thermal conductivity is decreased by force-constant disorder without sacrificing mechanical strength and stiffness. Thus, high-entropy ceramics propel a wide range of applications: from wear resistant coatings and thermal and environmental barriers to catalysts, batteries, thermoelectrics and nuclear energy management. Here, we discuss recent progress of the field, with a particular emphasis on disorder-enhanced properties and applications.