Drawing No. EH–MT–028 // Engineering Materials
Zirconia Ceramic Properties
Reviewed August 2026
Zirconia is unusual among ceramics for its high fracture toughness and strength, enabled by transformation toughening in stabilized grades.
Representative properties
The stated basis, temperature and direction are part of the value. Switch units without changing the physical reference.
What changes these properties?
Engineering variability
- Stabilizer chemistry, grain size and aging determine toughness and low-temperature degradation behavior.
- Thermal conductivity is very low, making zirconia a thermal-insulating structural ceramic.
- Mechanical strength is surface/flaw sensitive.
- Phase transformations and stabilizer loss govern high-temperature limits.
Selection note
Used for wear components, cutting blades, pump parts, bearings, dental/medical components and thermal-insulating precision parts.
Where a property is shown as qualitative rather than numeric, that is intentional: the selected source or the material physics does not justify a single comparable scalar.
How to interpret this material
Stiffness
Young’s modulus describes elastic stiffness. For crystals and composites, orientation can make one scalar modulus only a directional reference.
Strength / failure
Ductile metals can use yield and tensile strength. Brittle ceramics/semiconductors and anisotropic composites require fracture, flexural or directional strength descriptions instead.
Thermal response
Conductivity, heat capacity and expansion are temperature dependent. The last column is a melting or transition descriptor only where that physical concept is appropriate.
Technical sources
The database favors manufacturer, industry, government or academic technical references and labels secondary condition-specific datasets when a primary source does not expose a complete property set.