For decades, brittleness has been regarded as an intrinsic characteristic of ceramics. Unlike metals, which can bend or deform before breaking, ceramic materials have long been expected to fail suddenly once their strength limit is reached. This conventional understanding has defined both the scientific perception of ceramics and their practical applications in engineering.
Recently, a team of materials scientists led by Kexin Chen from the Advanced Structural Ceramics Innovation Center at Yongjiang Laboratory, China, published a comprehensive review that reexamines the long-held perception of ceramics as inherently brittle materials. The review brings together recent advances in room-temperature plasticity, covering deformation mechanisms such as dislocation motion, phase transformation, and grain boundary sliding; emerging strategies for enhancing plasticity; advanced in situ characterization and strain measurement techniques to reveal the interplay between microstructure, defects, and mechanical behavior; as well as potential engineering applications and future research priorities.
The team published their work in Journal of Advanced Ceramics on July 21, 2026.
"In this report, we reviewed systematically the research advancements in room temperature plasticity in various ceramics. Drawing together recent breakthroughs across multiple ceramic systems, it shows that room-temperature plasticity—once considered nearly impossible in ceramics—is becoming an emerging reality. The review demonstrates that ceramics are capable of irreversible deformation through a variety of mechanisms, fundamentally reshaping how scientists understand these traditionally brittle materials." Said Kexin Chen, Director of the Advanced Structural Ceramics Innovation Center at Ningbo Yongjiang Laboratory (China), a senior expert whose research interests focus on the fabrication and plastic deformation mechanisms of room-temperature plastic ceramics, controllable synthesis of high-quality ultrafine ceramic powders, high-performance materials with ordered functional building blocks, and high-performance thermal management composite materials.
"In this review, we examine the advances that have accumulated over the past several years across oxide ceramics, nitrides, carbides, layered ceramics, nanostructured materials, and architected ceramic systems. Rather than presenting a single experimental breakthrough, we provide what we believe is the first comprehensive framework that unifies the rapidly expanding body of evidence demonstrating that plastic deformation in ceramics can occur under ambient conditions.
Historically, ceramics have been valued for their exceptional hardness, chemical stability, wear resistance, and ability to withstand extreme temperatures. These properties have made them indispensable in aerospace, electronics, energy systems, biomedical devices, and advanced manufacturing. However, their intrinsic brittleness has remained a major obstacle to broader structural applications. Because the stress required to activate dislocation motion in strongly ionic and covalent ceramics typically exceeds their fracture strength, cracks usually propagate before any significant plastic deformation can occur. This limitation has long been regarded as one of the fundamental challenges in materials science.
In this review, we argue that this traditional picture is no longer sufficient. Recent studies have revealed multiple pathways through which ceramics can accommodate deformation at room temperature. These include dislocation-mediated plasticity, stress-induced phase transformations, grain-boundary sliding, deformation twinning, interface-mediated deformation, and amorphous flow. We emphasize that these mechanisms are no longer confined to isolated microscale experiments. Instead, increasing evidence demonstrates that carefully designed bulk ceramics and architected ceramic materials can also exhibit substantial deformability while maintaining their inherent strength and thermal stability.
Beyond summarizing these deformation mechanisms, we highlight how advances in materials design are making room-temperature plasticity increasingly achievable. We show that defect engineering can activate mobile dislocations and lower the barriers to plastic deformation. Structural engineering—including coherent interfaces, layered architectures, nanocrystalline structures, and crystalline–amorphous composites—can improve deformation compatibility while suppressing catastrophic fracture. In addition, external-field regulation and nanoscale microstructural design provide further opportunities for tailoring mechanical behavior.
We also emphasize that progress in this field has been driven by major improvements in characterization techniques. Modern in situ transmission electron microscopy, synchrotron-based measurements, high-resolution strain mapping, and advanced mechanical testing now allow researchers to directly observe dislocation motion, phase transformations, grain-boundary behavior, and interface evolution during deformation. These experimental capabilities have significantly enhanced our understanding of how atomic-scale defects and microstructures govern macroscopic mechanical performance.
Importantly, we distinguish several concepts that are often confused in ceramic research. Improved fracture toughness does not necessarily imply plasticity, and nonlinear deformation does not always represent true irreversible plastic flow. Accordingly, we propose a clearer framework for distinguishing intrinsic plasticity arising from crystal-lattice deformation from extrinsic plasticity originating from grain boundaries, interfaces, or engineered architectures. We believe that this unified perspective provides a common language for comparing different ceramic systems and evaluating future advances.
Although remarkable progress has been achieved, we recognize that significant challenges remain before plastically deformable ceramics can be widely adopted in engineering applications. Most demonstrations of room-temperature plasticity have been limited to specific materials, carefully engineered microstructures, or small-scale specimens. Achieving reliable and scalable plastic deformation in bulk ceramics while maintaining high strength, long-term stability, and manufacturing feasibility remains an important objective for future research.
Looking forward, we suggest that future efforts should focus on discovering intrinsically plastic ceramic systems, developing scalable fabrication strategies, integrating multiscale structural design, and combining experimental characterization with computational modeling. We believe that such advances could enable a new generation of ceramic materials that combine exceptional hardness, thermal stability, and chemical resistance with unprecedented damage tolerance and deformability.
Overall, rather than overturning decades of ceramic science, we present a more nuanced understanding of ceramic mechanics. In our view, brittleness should no longer be regarded as an unavoidable material property, but rather as a mechanical behavior that can be tailored through atomic-scale defects, microstructural architecture, and materials design. As research in this area continues to expand, we anticipate that room-temperature plasticity will become a defining feature of next-generation structural ceramics, opening new opportunities for applications ranging from aerospace and energy technologies to electronics and advanced manufacturing."
Other contributors include: Zhitong Xu, Jie Zhang, Liran Dong, Yuanwei Chao from Advanced Structural Ceramics Innovation Center, YongJiang Laboratory in Ningbo, China; Guanghua Liu from State Key Laboratory for Advanced Metals and Materials, University of Science and Technology Beijing in Beijing, China.
About Author
Kexin Chen, Director of the Advanced Structural Ceramics Innovation Center at Ningbo Yongjiang Laboratory, Research Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the State Key Laboratory for Advanced Metals and Materials. He is a Distinguished Young Expert with Outstanding Contributions under the National Ten-Thousand Talents Program and a Recipient of the Special Government Allowance from the State Council. After earning his doctoral degree from the University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB) in 1997, he successively served as Lecturer, Associate Professor and Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University. He previously worked at the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). Currently, he is affiliated with the State Key Laboratory for Advanced Metals and Materials, USTB, and serves as. He also holds concurrent posts as Deputy Secretary-General of the Chinese Ceramic Society, and serves on the editorial boards of academic journals including Journal of Materials Research, Journal of the Chinese Ceramic Society, Chinese Science Bulletin, and Journal of Materiomics.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No.2025YFF0520903), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.U23A20566 and No.52531005), Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (No.LZYQ25E020001 and No.LD26E010002), "Pioneer" and "Leading Goose" R & D Program of Zhejiang (Grant No.2024SSYS0051), Young Scientists Innovation Team of Zhejiang Province (Grant No.2025TD2072), the Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) (Grant No. 2024QNRC001).
DOI Link: 10.26599/JAC.2026.9221353
About Journal of Advanced Ceramics
Journal of Advanced Ceramics (JAC) is an international academic journal that presents the state-of-the-art results of theoretical and experimental studies on the processing, structure, and properties of advanced ceramics and ceramic-based composites. JAC is Fully Open Access, monthly published by Tsinghua University Press, and exclusively available via SciOpen . JAC's 2025 IF is 14, ranking in Top 1 (1/34, Q1) among all journals in "Materials Science, Ceramics" category, and its 2025 CiteScore is 24.6 (6/133) in Scopus database. ResearchGate homepage: https://www.researchgate.net/journal/Journal-of-Advanced-Ceramics-2227-8508
