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Kinetic analysis remains a powerful tool for studying a large variety of reactions, which lies at the core of material science and industry. It aims at obtaining the kinetic parameters and model that best describe a given process and using that information to make reliable predictions in a wide range of conditions. Nonetheless, kinetic analysis often relies on mathematical models derived assuming ideal conditions that are not necessarily met in real processes. The existence of nonideal conditions causes large modifications to the functional form of kinetic models. Therefore, in many cases, experimental data hardly obey any of these ideal models. In this work, we present a novel method for the analysis of integral data obtained under isothermal conditions without any type of assumption about the kinetic model. The method is valid both for processes that follow and for those that do not follow ideal kinetic models. It consists of using a general kinetic equation to find the functional form of the kinetic model via numerical integration and optimization. The procedure has been tested both with simulated data affected by nonuniform particle size and experimental data corresponding to the pyrolysis of ethylene-propylene-diene.

Flash Sintering (FS), a relatively new Field-Assisted Sintering Technique (FAST) for ceramic processing, was proposed for the first time in 2010 by Prof. Rishi Raj’s group from the University of Colorado at Boulder. It quickly grabbed the attention of the scientific community and since then, the field has rapidly evolved, constituting a true milestone in materials processing with the number of publications growing year by year. Moreover, nowadays, there is already a scientific community devoted to FS. In this work, a general picture of the scientific landscape of FS is drawn by bibliometric analysis. The target sources, the most relevant documents, hot and trending topics as well as the social networking of FS are unveiled. A separate bibliometric analysis is also provided for Reaction or Reactive Flash Sintering (RFS), where not only the sintering, but also the synthesis is merged into a single step. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of this nature carried out in this field of research and it can constitute a useful tool for researchers to be quickly updated with FS as well as to strategize future research and publishing approaches.