Nowadays many efforts are being mad

Nowadays many efforts are being made to reduce energy consumption in most industrial sectors, especially in ceramic manufacturing [1].Among the manufacturing techniques, sintering is a process used to produce dense solids from particulate material and is typically assisted by thermal energy and/or pressure. Due to the high melting temperatures of most ceramic materials , the conventional sintering of polycrystalline ceramics is generally performed at high temperatures (˜1000–1200 °C, since as a general rule the sintering temperature is assumed to be 50–75% of the melting temperature) and the time required to obtain even a pellet of dense material can vary from a few hours to several days [2]. This process therefore requires huge amounts of energy. To decrease the temperature and/or the sintering time, many innovations have been developed over years: liquid phase sintering [3,4], pressure assisted sintering [4], microwave sintering [4] and flash sintering [5]. A new method of pressure-assisted sintering (100–500 MPa) has been recently developed to obtain dense ceramics using water or an aqueoussolution as a transient solvent to perform densification at very low temperatures (< 300 °C) and short times [6–8]. This new sintering technique has been called Cold Sintering Process (CSP) to highlight its diversity from conventional sintering performed at high temperature [6].