Mullite

Mullite is certainly one of the most important ceramic materials, although it occurs only rarely in natural rocks. Mullite is a main constituent of potteries, porcelains, sanitary ceramics, refractories and of structural clay products. Besides its importance for conventional ceramics, mullite is a strong candidate material for advanced structural and functional ceramics and for composites. Reasons for the importance of mullite are its outstanding properties: low thermal expansion, low thermal and electrical conductivities, excellent creep resistance and stability in harsh high temperature environments. Besides its importance for ceramics, mullite has also attracted interest from mineralogists and chemists. This is due to the fact that mullite has a complex real crystal structure, the phase is able to incorporate big amounts of foreign atoms, and that there exists a whole family of mullite-type crystal structures related to actual mullite. The crystal chemistry of mullite opens a wide field of new material developments with specific properties. This volume gives an overview on the recent knowledge of mullite, mullite ceramics, and mullite matrix composites. It was an important aim of the authors to bring together the expertise of crystallographers, chemists, material scientists and of engineers in order to achieve a better understanding and an improvement of the properties of mullite, but also to identify new application fields of these materials. The book addresses materials scientists, solid state chemists and physicists, crystallographers and mineralogists alike.