Sol-gel derived ceramics

Abstract

The synthesis of ceramic raw materials has become an important factor in ceramic technologies. The increasing demands to the performance of ceramic compounds has caused increased activities for the preparation of tailor-made raw materials. Amongst a variety of new syntheses like flame pyrolysis, reactive spray drying, plasma or laser assisted techniques, the sol-gel process plays an important and increasing role. The process describes the building up of an inorganic (in general an oxide) network by a chemical condensation reaction. There is numerous literature concerning sol-gel techniques for the synthesis of ceramics (1-12). Summarizing, on can say that despite of the tremendous effort in science there are still remarkable deficiencies in the knowledge of reaction mechanisms in systems beside SiO2 and for multicomponent systems (including additives like sinter aids or dopants).