Porous thermal insulating ceramics play a pivotal role in both industrial processes and daily life by offering effective insulation solutions that reduce energy consumption, enhance building comfort, and contribute to the sustainability of industrial production. This review offers a comprehensive examination of porous thermal insulating ceramics produced by 3D printing, providing an in‐depth analysis of various 3D printing techniques and materials used to produce porous ceramics, detailing the fabrication processes, advantages, and limitations of these methods. Recent advances in 3D printed porous thermal insulating ceramics are thoroughly examined, with a particular focus on pore structure design and optimization strategies for high‐performance thermal insulation. This review also addresses the challenges and barriers to widespread adoption while highlighting future research directions and emerging trends poised to drive innovation. By showcasing the transformative potential of 3D printing in revolutionizing traditional porous ceramics manufacturing methods and enhancing thermal insulation performance, this review underscores the critical role of 3D printed porous ceramics in advancing thermal insulation technology.

Hard brittle materials such as ceramics and crystals are commonly utilized in various industries, including information technology, mechanical engineering, and semiconductors. These materials, known for their high brittleness and hardness but low fracture toughness, pose challenges in efficient and high-quality machining. Current abrasive machining techniques involve rough grinding, fine grinding, and polishing processes, with the latter being the most time-consuming and accounting for over half of the total machining time. Improving processing parameters in rough and fine grinding can increase machining efficiency, reduce surface and subsurface damage, and improve workpiece quality, ultimately reducing the polishing time. This paper explores the abrasive scratching of hard brittle materials, examining the nucleation and propagation of cracks causing surface and subsurface damage, and the underlying mechanisms. The research provides suggestions for enhancing abrasive machining efficiency and ensuring the surface quality of hard brittle materials.

Advanced ceramics, such as alumina and zirconia, are widely used in modern industries, due to their superior properties, such as high hardness and strength. Fracture toughness is a significant property that describes the capability of materials to resist crack instability and expansion to failure, and also helps when calculating the allowable working stress, and crack size, of the component. This paper comprehensively lists the current toughness-testing methods. With comparative investigations of various methods, edge chipping is found to be the simplest way of measuring the ceramic fracture-toughness, in terms of the dominant median crack, chip geometrical similarity, and force-distance relations, giving consideration to its potential application in industry. Moreover, to avoid the data variance from crack-length measurement in edge chipping, it is further proposed that the energy analyses can be used to improve the way in which the toughness expression is formulated.

Laser texturing process is a promising method to alter the wettability of metal surface on which micro/nano rough structures are created for changing the contact angle between the textured surface and liquid droplet. This paper aims at fabricating a superhydrophobic surface on AISI316L stainless steel, and a nanosecond pulse laser was employed for texturing line and point patterns on the metal surface. The influences of texturing patterns, laser power, scan speed, irradiation duration, and aging hours on the water contact angle and morphology of workpiece surface were investigated. According to the results, the hydrophilic surface was obtained right after the texturing process, and the surface turned to be hydrophobic after being left in ambient air for 15 days. The aging of laser-textured surface was also performed to induce the chemisorption of hydrocarbons toward the surface. This post process was able to shorten the hydrophilic-to-hydrophobic transition from days to a few hours. The aging duration of 2 and 0.5 h was respectively recommended for yielding and stabilizing the superhydrophobicity on line- and point-patterned surfaces. The maximum contact angle of 159.61° was achievable when the point pattern was textured on the stainless steel surface by using the laser power of 10 W and irradiation duration of 0.18 ms.