The attractive properties of ceramic materials include their usually low density, their resistance to high temperatures, corrosion and oxidation along with their good tribological behaviour. Besides these, depending on their chemical composition, some ceramic materials exhibit functional properties that allow the fabrication of electronic components, such as sensors for instance. One disadvantage of ceramics is, however, their immanent brittleness, which can only be reduced but not completely avoided even despite complex fabrication processes. In long years of work with ceramic materials and a multitude of different tests with ceramic structural components, it has been shown that the generally higher costs of ceramic materials compared to metals are only acceptable when definite benefits of their use can be identified and passed on to customers. This is true for the expensive ceramic brake disks for example. And it is for this reason that in automotive engineering, despite their favourable properties, ceramic materials are used almost without exception in the classical ceramic applications such as spark plug insulators, lambda sensors, glow plugs, pump seals and components for exhaust gas treatment systems, e.g. monoliths as catalyst substrates and particle filters. Finally, there is growing interest in ceramic fibres for thermal insulation.
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