Electro Ceramics Web Course (NPTEL)

Contact information of the course instructor:

Ashish Garg, Associate Professor
Department of Materials science and Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
Kanpur 208016, India
Telephone: 0512-259-7904
Email: ashishg@iitk.ac.in
Web: http://home.iitk.ac.in/~ashishg

Introduction

Electro-ceramics or broadly speaking electronic, optical and magnetic ceramics are useful in a variety of technological applications such as sensors, actuators, transducers, data storage devices etc.
Some of the examples are

• Dielectric materials such as SiO₂  are used as data storage elements in random access memories or RAMs
• Ferroelectrics such as BaTiO₃ and PbTiO₃ are used as sensors and actuators
• Magnetic oxides such as iron oxides are used for data storage in magnetic heads
• ZnO is used circuit protection materials in devices named as varistors
• ZrO₂ stabilized with other oxides is used in fuel cells and batteries

Hence, to understand these materials better and to engineer them as per our needs, we need to understand their science viz. their structure, defects in these materials, phenomenon of conduction, fundamentals of various functional properties. A sound understanding of these would (hopefully) enable us tailor the structure and properties of these material with good degree of control.

Pre-requisites

• Basic courses on structure of materials, thermodynamics, and solid state physics
• Suited for final year undergraduate students of most disciplines and fresh graduate students.

List of Topics