Traditional sintering practices have limits to control the microstructure effectively. For example, it is difficult to produce nanostructured materials because of the grain growth in the final stage of sintering [8]. Some of the contemporary techniques address this problem: sintering under the effect of electrical current and pressure, i.e. spark plasma sintering (SPS) [39–41], sintering by microwave [42–44], sintering by electrical joule heating, i.e. flash sintering allowing very rapid densification (