讲座安排：2026年11月2日下午16:00，犀浦校区X30280

2026年11月3日下午16:00，九里校区J3324

讲座题目：Pathways to low embodied energy in ceramics processing

主讲人：Salvatore GrassoQueen Mary University of London, UK

个人简介：

Dr Salvatore Grasso is a Senior Lecturer in Ceramics at the School of Engineering and Materials Science, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), and a Royal Society Industry Fellow (2025-2029).

He trained in materials engineering at the Politecnico di Torino in northern Italy and completed his PhD at the University of Tsukuba in 2011, carrying out his research on electric current-assisted sintering at the National Institute for Materials Science, Japan. He then held a Marie Curie fellowship at QMUL. From 2017 to 2022 he was a Full Professor at Southwest Jiaotong University.

His research has moved from spark plasma sintering to flash, cold and ultrafast high-temperature sintering, guided by one principle: directing energy into the material being processed while minimising losses. At QMUL he runs the MagMat facility for electromagnetic processing, with magnetic fields of up to 15 tesla, and leads the EPSRC Green-Loop project, which applies the same ideas to recycling solar panels. He was recently appointed Editor-in-Chief of Advances in Applied Ceramics and is an Editor of the Journal of the European Ceramic Society.

讲座内容：

This seminar first traces a century of electrified sintering, from Acheson's furnace, patented in 1893 and still the basis of SiC and graphite production, to spark plasma sintering and flash sintering. It distinguishes indirect electrical heating, where an external element heats the part by radiation and convection, from direct Joule heating, where current is dissipated inside the material. Whatever the heating mode, energy efficiency is controlled mainly by heat losses.

Three emerging low-energy routes are then compared: cold sintering, which densifies powders below 300 °C using a liquid and pressure; field-assisted sintering by direct Joule heating; and ultrafast high-temperature sintering (UHS). Case studies include flash spark plasma sintering of ZrB₂ and SiC, cold-sintered graphite and powder-bed UHS. Graphite-felt UHS densifies samples under 1 g within seconds, while powder-bed configurations reach components above 100 g, and continuous sliding geometries are projected to reach 4.5 MJ/kg and an energy-utilization efficiency of 34%.

The talk closes with the hybridization of rapid heating, dynamic thermal control and heat recirculation, the scale-up challenge, and links to recycling, including flash Joule heating of end-of-life solar panels.