Libro

Preface

Ceramic materials have played an important role throughout the history of mankind, as they still do. Ceramic pottery made from baked clays originated in the mesolithic era while its industrial production started in the XVIII^th century, followed by manufacture of other ceramic materials using natural raw materials, such as bricks, tiles, refractories, sewage pipes, line and railway insulators a.s.o. The XX^th century has witnessed development of a culture the attributes of which are a.o. semiconductors, computers, new telecommunication technologies and biotechnologies. Advances in most of these and many other fields have been made feasible by application of new and/or improved materials, among them advanced ceramic materials. In contrast to the classic ones, they are produced mainly from deeply transformed natural materials and synthetic compounds, and are made in a variety of forms, beginning with single crystals, through polycrystals, composites, thin layers and fibrous materials to nanomaterials.
Contemporary ceramic materials are the subject of the present book. Its title "ABC of Contemporary Ceramic Materials" implies that in writing the book aimed at has been an introductory picture of the general ideas that moulded and are still shaping the world of contemporary ceramics. In line with its title, the book emphasizes the first principles of ceramic science and engineering in a way as simple as admissible and as concise as possible.
Although the book differs from a mere collection of information proper to an encyclopaedia it is intended to be a scaffold for an efficient use of the - vast and hardly to master - bibliography on modern ceramics. Namely, the main difficulty for somebody who wants to attain by reading an understanding of a given branch of science is the sea of books, journals, internet pages and information in media. It has been pointed out that this causes a cognitive chaos with the reader but also a longing for interpretation. There is thus a gap on the market to be filled by such books as the present one.
The author hopes that materials science & engineering students, newcomers to the field of ceramics and people doing marketing and testing of ceramic materials will find such a book useful. Also specialists of related areas, since the enormous growth of the volume of knowledge has brought about an unavoidable specialization and refuge-seeking in modern "ivory towers" while it is a cross-fertilising - by exchange of information between more or less remote fields - that generates new ideas and "...has been the source of progress during the whole history" (Adam Smith).
The content of the book is divided into three parts entitled: A. The Immanent Properties, B. The Types and C. The Fabrication. Namely, tailoring the properties of ceramic materials to their specific functions and their efficient application in devices and equipment requires an understanding of the relationships between these three aspects of ceramic materials science and engineering.
Although the text of the present book owes much to numerous original papers and books on materials science, except for quoting the sources of a few adopted figures, no references to all of them are given. This has been deemed not necessary, because the scaffold function of the book permits a meaningful use of the scattered and/or detailed information in the internet, professional journals and specialised books. Moreover, a doubling of the book's volume - at the very least - is thereby avoided, an exhaustion of the relevant bibliography still being impossible.
The suggested reading given below embraces, with the exception of a few significant earlier writings, only some more recent general books. All of them convey comprehensive, personal opinions about whole fields of ceramic science and engineering. These have been considered more helpful for the unprepared reader than collective texts because of the wide range of the (often contradictory) opinions expressed there by various authors.