Prof Jon Binner

Jon Binner is Professor of Ceramic Materials and Head of the Institute of Polymer Technology and Materials Engineering at Loughborough University. He is also the Director of CERAM-University Collaboration at CERAM Research in the UK and a Visiting Professor at Kunming University in China. He obtained his Bachelors and PhD from the Ceramics Department at Leeds University and has since worked as an academic at the Universities of California at Los Angeles, Leeds, Nottingham and Brunel; he was also Head of Department at the latter.

The focus of Jon Binner’s research is the generation of both the necessary scientific understanding and the required engineering solutions for the development of processing routes for ceramic materials that display technical and/or financial advantages over existing processes and which yield new or improved materials. His work has mainly focused on colloidal processing, where the aim is to understand and hence control the rheology of ceramic suspensions, and microwave processing, where the aim is to generate a detailed understanding of the interaction between microwaves and advanced non-metallic materials and then to use this to develop improved process routes. Over the past few years, the work has increasingly focused on producing nanostructured ceramics from a ‘top-down’ approach.

Successful achievements have included:

• The development and patenting of a new process route for the manufacture of ceramic foams. This was commercialised in the mid ‘90s via the creation of a new company, Hi-Por Ceramics Ltd;
• The development and patenting in the late ‘90s of ‘in-situ coagulation moulding’, a new suspension-based process route for the manufacture of complex shaped ceramics with particularly homogeneous microstructures. Recently he has combined this process with the polymer-based concept of rotary moulding to generate a fast production process for the manufacture of large or small hollow-shaped items. This approach, developed in conjunction with CERAM Research over the past 3 years, has also seen a patent submission and is currently undergoing technology transfer to industry.
• The development in the early ‘90s of the ability to join a number of engineering ceramics using microwaves in a matter of minutes. For one ceramic, 84% pure alumina, the join could be made in as little as 10 minutes at temperature with no evidence of the join region in the subsequent microstructure and with joint strengths at least equivalent to the base material.
• The development in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s of a fast production process to the manufacture of both C-C and SiC-SiC fibre based composites; materials which currently take hundreds of hours to make by isothermal CVI. Both materials were produced by electromagnetically heated versions of the CVI process. For C-C composites, radio frequency heating was used and the process, which generated composites in a matter of 20 - 30 hours, was patented and transferred to Dunlop Aviation to take the process to pilot scale production. In the other development involving SiC-SiC composites, the technology was transferred to QinetiQ (formerly the Defence Evaluation Research Agency) who are also looking to scale it up. The process again promises fully dense composites in 20 - 30 hours.
• The majority of Jon Binner’s recent work has focused on the development of processing routes to the production of fully dense ceramic components with uniform nanostructures and average grain sizes of <100 nm. Four major thrusts are being pursued, viz. the thorough characterisation of nano ceramic powders, the development of flowable, crushable nano ceramic powders for industrial-scale die pressing, the development of low viscosity, high solids content nano particle suspensions (successfully achieved and a patent application submitted) and the ability to sinter the resultant ceramics to full density by pressureless sintering whilst retaining a final average grain size <100 nm. This has also been achieved for nano zirconia powders, with the finest average grain size to date being 64 nm for an initial average precursor powder size of 19 nm. For a variety of reasons it has been decided not to patent this process.

Jon Binner has published over 125 research papers, given over 20 invited, keynote and plenary presentations at international conferences, attracted nearly 80 research grants totalling in excess of £5.1M and holds four patents with two more recently submitted. Approximately 55% of the research income is from industry in terms of number of grants and about 35% in terms of value; a number of the projects have also been international in nature, mainly within the European Union. 18 PhD students and 1 MPhil student have been supervised to successful completion; 6 more PhD students are currently being supervised. A total of 16 Postdoctoral research projects have been supervised with three currently ongoing.

Jon Binner is a Fellow of both the Institute of Materials, Mining and Minerals (IoM3), for which he Chairs the Ceramic Science Committee, and the Institute of Nanotechnology and a member of the American Ceramic Society. He is the Secretary for the Association for Microwave Processing in Europe for Research and Education (AMPERE) and a member of the US-based Microwave Working Group. He received the Holliday Prize from the Institute of Materials in 1995.