Will high-entropy carbides and borides be enabling materials for extreme environments?

Abstract

Highlights: The concept of multi-principal component has created promising opportunities for the development of novel high-entropy ceramics for extreme environments. Some high-entropy carbides and borides show unique physical properties such as higher hardness, high-temperature strength, lower thermal conductivity, and improved irradiation resistance than the constitute ceramics. These promising properties may be attributed to the compositional complexity, atomic-level disorder, lattice distortion, and other fundamental processes related to defect formation and phonon scattering.