Experimental evidence for similar critical behavior of elastic modulus and electric conductivity in porous ceramic materials

We show experimentally that the elastic modulus of porous ceramics has a critical exponent tau approximately equal to that of conductivity, tau congruent to t congruent to 2. This behavior is attributed to the predominance of bond-stretching over bond-bending contribution to the energy and is related to intrinsic properties (like ductility or brittleness) of the homogeneous material.