Hydrothermal ageing is one lifetime-limiting phenomenon of zirconia-based ceramics and composites for many applications, from biomedical implants to ferrules and watches. Predicting hydrothermal ageing at use-temperature implies a set of accelerated ageing experiments conducted under water vapour at several, high temperatures (usually between 100 °C and 140 °C). From these data, the activation energy of ageing can be determined, and thus ageing can be predicted at any temperature. However, obtaining precise extrapolations with this procedure requires the use of lower temperatures (70 or 80 °C), leading to a rather long procedure (up to a few thousand hours), and should involve at least one specimen for each test temperature. This article presents a new procedure that allows the determination of all ageing parameters and the estimation of kinetics at use-temperatures with the use of a single specimen within a shorter time, accurate enough for fast screening of new materials.

水热老化是基于氧化锆的陶瓷和复合材料的一种限制寿命的现象，从生物医学植入物到密封垫圈和手表，其在许多应用中都存在。预测使用温度下的水热老化意味着在数个高温下（通常在100°C至140°C之间）在水蒸气下进行的一组加速老化实验。根据这些数据，可以确定老化的活化能，因此可以在任何温度下预测老化。但是，通过此程序获得精确的外推法需要使用较低的温度（70或80°C），从而导致相当长的程序（长达数千小时），并且每个测试温度都应至少包含一个样本。