A pre-stressing design and a simple fabrication technology to substantially improve the strength of ceramic components are presented. Residual surface compressive stress is generated in ceramic components by pressureless sintering of a green bulk coated with a thin layer of low coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE). The stress level can be controlled by changing the cross-section area ratio, Young's modulus ratio and CTE ratio of the coating. Pre-stressed ZrO₂ ceramics coated with Al₂O₃ can achieve a flexural strength of 1330 ± 52 MPa, 45% higher than their uncoated counterpart. Similarly, the flexural strength of building porcelain tiles is increased by 70%, from 67 ± 3 MPa to 114 ± 5 MPa. The damage tolerance of pre-stressed ZrO₂ ceramics is excellent with a high residual strength of ~1200 MPa in a thermal shock test at 325 ℃. This simple technique can improve the mechanical performance of ceramic components with no limitation of size and shape.

The accurate evaluation of the elastic modulus of ceramic coatings at high temperature (HT) is of high significance for industrial application, yet it is not easy to get the practical modulus at HT due to the difficulty of the deformation measurement and coating separation from the composite samples. This work presented a simple approach in which relative method was used twice to solve this problem indirectly. Given a single-face or double-face coated beam sample, the relative method was firstly used to determine the real mid-span deflection of the three-point bending piece at HT, and secondly to derive the analytical relation among the HT moduli of the coating, the coated and uncoated samples. Thus the HT modulus of the coatings on beam samples is determined uniquely via the measured HT moduli of the samples with and without coatings. For a ring sample (from tube with outer-side, inner-side, and double-side coating), the relative method was used firstly to determine the real compression deformation of a split ring sample at HT, secondly to derive the relationship among the slope of load-deformation curve of the coated ring, the HT modulus of the coating and substrate. Thus, the HT modulus of ceramic coatings can be evaluated by the substrate modulus and the load-deformation data of coated rings. Mathematic expressions of those calculations were derived for the beam and ring samples. CVD-SiC coatings on graphite substrate were selected as the testing samples, of which the measured modulus ranging from room temperature to 2100 ℃ demonstrated the validity and convenience of the relative method.