The PhD work will benefit from access to unique facilities including www.magmat.uk, custom-built ultrafast high-temperature furnaces, and QMUL's state-of-the-art Green Energy Hub a comprehensive laboratory network equipped with advanced wet chemistry facilities and extraction hoods for materials research . These facilities represent Queen Mary's commitment to renewable energy research, with research expertise spanning material development, processing, characterisation and modelling. The Hub provides cutting-edge laboratory infrastructure alongside SEMS's extensive facilities portfolio. You will work under the supervision of Dr. Salvatore Grasso (https://www.sems.qmul.ac.uk/staff/s.grasso/), a leading expert in ceramics processing with over 300 publications and 28 patents, whose vision is to "develop better materials using less energy without critical elements" and whose research focuses on multi-field assisted processing and non-equilibrium conditions in sustainable ceramic manufacturing.

In the past decade new and exciting consolidation techniques have emerged. Compared to conventional sintering, these techniques can lower energy requirement by 95%. Firing energy reduction is achieved either i) by limiting the processing temperature to 300 °C, as in the case of cold sintering; or ii) by minimizing wasted heat by reducing firing times as in the case of Ultrafast high temperature sintering (UHS), with heating rates well above 100 °C/min.

Ceramic manufacturing remains a highly energy-intensive and it yearly accounts for 1.2 trillion Kg of CO2. The migration to low carbon electricity and high energy efficient firing is an essential option to “reduce overall industry emissions of up to 70% by 2050”. So far, low energy sintering methods remain unexplored and poorly understood and they have been focused on engineered ceramics (i.e., ZnO and ZrO2). A negligible impact on the CO2 emissions is anticipated because of their limited production volumes. A real decarbonization in the sector can only be achieved by implementing low energy firing to large scale manufacturing and to mass produced ceramics.

Despite the strong push towards such a rapid decarbonization, with some governments cutting fossil fuel subsidies, the implementation of low energy firing techniques has several open challenges:

• Identify suitable ceramic composition that are both fully compatible with low energy firing and can effectively cut CO2 emissions.
• Integrate smoothly low energy firing with a greener approach to manufacture ceramics (i.e., avoid multiple re-heating steps)
• Understand the basic science driving low energy firing is an essential requirement to develop facile and scalable processing routes

The research deeply engages with recent decarbonization trends in industrial manufacturing, it also opens door to unprecedented and unexplored opportunities in the sector.