3. Results and discussionFig. 1 plots the power dissipation as a function of time for differ-ent electric fields applied. The curves obtained at all five differentfields show the characteristic behavior of flash sintering—existence of power dissipation surge, indicating that the composite can beflash-sintered within the range of applying field at the furnacetemperature of 1000◦C. The curves also show that the incuba-tion time (the time before the occurrence of the surge) for thecomposite quickly decreases with increasing the applied field, sim-ilar to yttria stabilized zirconia without SiC whiskers [20]. Whilethe flash-sintering occurred at the furnace temperature of 1000◦C,the specimen temperature could be much higher than the furnacetemperature due to Joule heating [16,21–24]. Here, the specimentemperature was estimated by using the model described in Ref.[16], to be 1400◦C, which is similar to the conventional sinteringtemperature for 3YSZ [25].