Symposium CI
Progress in Electroceramics Research

Improvements in basic knowledge and practical exploitation of their unique properties, has established electrical ceramics as a central and fast developing sector in materials research, resulting in a significant impact on several areas of modern technologies. The increasing demand for even more refined or novel properties hardly to be competitively met by other materials is fuelling the interest for improved or new processing routes and deeper understanding of the fundamental materials science to meet requirements coming from a variety of advanced civilian and defence applications.
Materials with unusually high dielectric constant, with low loss and low temperature resonance coefficient at very high frequencies, lead-free piezoelectrics, multifunctional materials such as multiferroic heterostructures and ionic and mixed ionic electronic conducting ceramics are but some examples of the ongoing developments in the area which massively makes use of the opportunities offered by nanoscience and nanotechnology, and by computational modelling and new theory.
 
Major focus will be on:
 

• Development of new and more efficient processes, better characterisation tools of bulk, crystalline, glassy and amorphous materials, thin films, multilayers, superlattices, nanomaterials, nanostructures and hybrid materials; advances in thin-film and related  micro/ nano-fabrication techniques and “bottom-up” approaches that offer the potential for high-density integration of nanoscale devices
• Fundamental mechanisms, novel (multi)functional characteristics and behaviour of materials such as electronic structure, quantum effects, phase transitions, transport phenomena, defects, diffusion, domain structure and switching, grain boundary controlled mechanisms, nanosize effects, surfaces and interfaces, dielectric, piezoelectric, magnetic and optical properties, ageing and fatigue, reliability, fractals, modeling and simulation, etc.
• New developments in devices including fuel cells, batteries, high energy density capacitors, gas separation membranes, tunable dielectrics for microwave applications, piezoelectric composites, sensors and actuators, MEMS/NEMS devices, and related integration technologies.