Mesoporous mesocrystals are highly desired in catalysis, energy storage, medical and many other applications, but most of synthesis strategies involve the usage of costly chemicals and complicated synthesis routes, which impede the commercialization of such materials. During the sintering of dense ceramics, coarsening is an undesirable phenomenon which causes the growth of the grains as well as the pores hence hinders the densification, however, coarsening is desired in the sintering of porous ceramics to expand the pore sizes while retaining the total pore volume. Here we report a chemi-thermal process, during which nanocrystallite aggregates were synthesized by hydrothermal process and then converted to the product by sintering. Through this strategy, we synthesized mesoporous self-supported mesocrystals of yttria-stabilized zirconia with tunable pore size and the process was then scaled-up to industrial production. The thermal conductivity measurement shows that the mesoporous powder is a good thermal isolator. The monolith pellets can be obtained by SPS sintering under high pressure and the mesoporosity is retained in the monolith pellets. This work features facile and scalable process as well as low cost raw chemicals making it highly desirable in industrial applications.

Compared with the versatility in metal industry, application of laser on oxide ceramics is quite limited due to the intrinsic features of ceramics and limited understanding in laser-ceramic interaction mechanism, especially for high-energy laser that causes melting of materials. In this research, a study into general behaviors of several oxide ceramics melted by laser under inert atmosphere is presented. Key factors in determining state transformation, chemical reduction and phase structure are summarized, with further investigation into the evolution in microstructure at multiscale and the corresponding novelty and metastability. It is found that laser melting does show great potential in introducing deep reduction, unique microstructure, and notable increase in structure complexity and total entropy, and those features could contribute to some unconventional functional performance with brand-new structure-property relationship.