The development of porous ceramic materials has brought a new challenge to a variety of industries because porous ceramics are more durable in severe environments and their surface characteristics permit them to satisfy specific functional purposes. With the growing demands of porous ceramics for industrial applications, a number of technologies have been developed to fabricate these materials with an attempt to control their pore characters, as well as to realize the pore-related properties in order to gain a deeper understanding of the relation between the various pore-related properties for optimization purposes. To date, porous ceramic materials with more delicate and uniform pore structures and pore sizes, ranging from a few hundred micrometers to a few nanometers, can be achieved for diverse purposes by either physical or chemical processing. This volume aims to give readers a better understanding of the processing and properties of the porous ceramic materials. This collection of papers covers the fabrication, property evaluation, characterization and applications of the porous ceramic materials developed to date. Included are fundamental theories, novel fabrication techniques, and special classes of ceramic materials involved in sensing and biomedical applications. The authors include: H. Abe, R.B. Bagwell, C. Cantalini, W.J. Chao, H.I. Chen, W.Q. Chen, A.S.T. Chiang, K.S. Chou, M. Egashira, A. Fukunaga, D.A. Hirschfeld, T.C. Huang, L.C. Klein, C.K. Lee, T.K. Li, F.H. Lin, C.C. Lin, D.M. Liu, H.C. Liu, G.L. Messing, S. Morimoto, K.S. Patel, M. Pelino, S.X. Qu, R.W. Rice, H.T. Sun, H. Tateyama, C.S. Tsay, H. Tsuzuki, C.Y. Wang, R.H. Woodman, Z.J. Yang, T. Yazawa, M.W. Yuan, M.Q. Zhang.
