View article

Regarding the recent energy costs and Net-Zero carbon emissions concerns, energy efficient and sustainable manufacturing technologies are becoming an important topic in the ceramic industry. In this work, we make a comparison for the energy consumption and densification processes of Zinc oxide (ZnO) ceramics fabricated using conventional solid-state sintering (CSS), spark plasma sintering (SPS), cold sintering process (CSP), and hybrid cold sintering process/spark plasma sintering (CSP-SPS). In order to achieve high dense ZnO ceramics (≥ 99%), the energy consumption using various sintering routes is obtained, i.e. 59080 kJ/g, 3715.7 kJ/g, 622.5 kJ/g and 679.2 kJ/g for CSS, SPS, CSP and CSP-SPS, respectively. Moreover, microstructural results show that the grain size of ZnO ceramics grows from 0.20 μm of the starting powder to 0.403 and 0.841 μm using CSP and CSP-SPS, while the values …