Clive Randall
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Materials Science
Making ceramics — the materials in tiles, bricks, capacitors and sensors — normally means firing powders in a kiln at well over a thousand degrees, which consumes enormous amounts of energy worldwide. Cold sintering is a newer route that densifies the same powders at temperatures roughly ten times lower by combining modest heat and applied pressure with a small amount of a transient liquid phase.
- Fields
Materials Science
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
cold sintering
ceramics
densification
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether pressure solution creep, the dissolution–transport–precipitation process that compacts sedimentary rock, accounts for densification during cold sintering of model ceramic systems.
- Identify which sequential step — chemo-mechanical dissolution, grain boundary dissolution, or precipitation — limits the rate of cold sintering under different processing conditions.
- Correlate densification kinetics and grain growth in cold sintering with those of conventional high-temperature sintering, where densification is driven by minimizing excess surface energy.
- Apply the cold sintering process to forming architectural bricks and tiles, and demonstrate local brick making for rural areas of Africa with the UN Global Buildings Network and the African Materials Research Society.
More about the research
Why it works is not fully understood, and this project looks for the answer in an unexpected place: the geology of how sedimentary rock forms.
Why it matters
Firing ceramics is energy-intensive, so a process that densifies them at an order of magnitude lower temperature could cut the energy and emissions of making everything from electronic components to building materials. Understanding the rate-limiting steps would let engineers apply cold sintering more widely and reliably. The brick and tile work, with the UN Global Buildings Network and the African Materials Research Society, could give rural communities a lower-energy way to produce local building materials.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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University of Central Florida, FL·Engineering·Early-career
Test whether concentrated salt solutions give green strength to oxide and nitride ceramic powder beds through ion transport and particle bridging during wetting and drying, using mechanical testing, microscopy and x-ray imaging.
Martin Harmer
Lehigh University, PA·Materials Science
Discover new sodium-ion conducting oxide ceramics by combining ultra-high-temperature synthesis, which sinters materials in about 10 seconds, with first-principles data-driven computation and high-throughput measurements.
Jaime Marian
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Materials Science
Determine how 'necklace' microstructures nucleate at grain boundaries during dynamic recrystallization in body-centered-cubic refractory multi-principal element alloys, using mesoscale modeling.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
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