Despite sintering has a history even longer than human civilization (its discovery dates back at least to 25,000 years ago), in the past decade, new exciting challenges have emerged in the field: reduction of environmental impact, densification of metastable phases, complete consolidation of ultra-refractory compounds, precise microstructural design to control properties of functional ceramics and integration between inorganic-organic compounds. In order to meet such challenges, new sintering routes employing electric fields/currents, water/solvents and external loads have been developed. The research also opened new questions about unexpected (and still not completely understood) interactions between electricity, presence of water/liquid, heating and diffusion processes.

In this manuscript, we have rationalized the last-ten-years research in the field of sintering for the consolidation of ceramics. The processes are collected into three main groups: flash-like (sintering under relatively large electric fields and the material is internally heated by the Joule effect), spark plasma sintering-like (combination of pressure and limited electric field) and hydro-consolidation (sintering at temperature below ≈ 350 °C in the presence of a liquid under an applied pressure). This paper aims to point out common features and differences among different techniques. Finally, future research trends and new paradigm in material processing are anticipated.

尽管烧结的历史比人类文明还要悠久（其发现可追溯到至少25,000年前），但在过去十年中，该领域出现了令人兴奋的新挑战：减少环境影响，亚稳相的致密化，超耐火材料，精确的微结构设计以控制功能陶瓷的性能以及无机有机化合物之间的结合。为了应对这些挑战，已经开发了利用电场/电流，水/溶剂和外部负载的新的烧结路线。该研究还提出了有关电，水/液体的存在，加热和扩散过程之间的意外相互作用（但尚未完全理解）的新问题。

在这份手稿中，我们对烧结陶瓷固结领域过去十年的研究进行了合理化。该过程分为三大类：闪蒸状（在相对较大的电场下烧结，并且材料通过焦耳效应在内部加热），火花等离子体烧结状（在压力和有限电场的结合下）和加氢固结（在温度低于≈350°C的条件下，在有液体存在的情况下，在压力下进行烧结）。本文旨在指出不同技术之间的共同特征和差异。最后，可以预见材料加工的未来研究趋势和新范例。