Expanding the members of ultra-high temperature ceramics and their maximum service temperature exceeding 3000 °C

Aerodynamic heating, oxidation, ablation, and high dynamic pressure represent the extreme environments that aerospace vehicles must withstand during high-Mach atmospheric or trans-atmospheric flight. The temperature of critical components on the vehicles can reach 3000 °C or higher. Such extreme environment imposes stringent requirements on thermal protection materials, such as ultra-high temperature ceramics (UHTCs) and their composites. It has come to light that the formation of a dense oxide scale with low oxygen permeability is crucial for ensuring the ablation resistance of UHTCs. As such, searching for oxides with melting points exceeding 3000 °C is one of the emerging directions. This perspective aims to briefly review the development of UHTCs and their composites over the past few decades. In addition, promising directions are proposed to meet the extreme environments. Concurrently, the assistance of multiscale modeling techniques to accelerate the development and application of UHTCs and their composites is emphasized.