Dislocation Engineering: A New Key to Enhancing Ceramic Performances

TL;DR

This paper reviews how dislocation engineering can be used to improve ceramic materials' performance, challenging the notion that dislocations are only relevant in metals and exploring their effects on various properties.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of dislocation effects in ceramics, highlighting new approaches to introduce dislocations without causing cracks and summarizing their influence on multiple properties.

Findings

Dislocation engineering can enhance ceramic mechanical properties.

Dislocations influence functional properties like ferroelectricity and thermal conductivity.

Various methods successfully introduce dislocations into ceramics without cracking.

Abstract

Dislocations are line defects in crystalline solids and often exert a significant influence on the mechanical properties of metals. Recently, there has been a growing interest in using dislocations in ceramics to enhance materials performance. However, dislocation engineering has frequently been deemed uncommon in ceramics owing to the brittle nature of ceramics. Contradicting this conventional view, various approaches have been used to introduce dislocations into ceramic materials without crack formation, thereby paving the way for controlled ceramics performance. However, the influence of dislocations on functional properties is equally complicated owing to the intricate structure of ceramic materials. Furthermore, despite numerous experiments and simulations investigating dislocation-controlled properties in ceramics, comprehensive reviews summarizing the effects of dislocations on ceramics are still lacking. This review focuses on some representative dislocation-controlled properties of ceramic materials, including mechanical and some key functional properties, such as transport, ferroelectricity, thermal conductivity, and superconducting properties. A brief integration of dislocations in ceramic is anticipated to offer new insights for the advancement of dislocation engineering across various disciplines.