Ultrahigh-temperature
ceramics (UHTCs) are a group of materials
with high technological interest because of their applications in
extreme environments. However, their characterization at high temperatures
represents the main obstacle for their fast development. Obstacles
are found from an experimental point of view, where only few laboratories
around the world have the resources to test these materials under
extreme conditions, and also from a theoretical point of view, where
actual methods are expensive and difficult to apply to large sets
of materials. Here, a new theoretical high-throughput framework for
the prediction of the thermoelastic properties of materials is introduced.
This approach can be systematically applied to any kind of crystalline
material, drastically reducing the computational cost of previous
methodologies up to 80% approximately. This new approach combines
Taylor expansion and density functional theory calculations to predict
the vibrational free energy of any arbitrary strained configuration,
which represents the bottleneck in other methods. Using this framework,
elastic constants for UHTCs have been calculated in a wide range of
temperatures with excellent agreement with experimental values, when
available. Using the elastic constants as the starting point, other
mechanical properties such a bulk modulus, shear modulus, or Poisson
ratio have been also explored, including upper and lower limits for
polycrystalline materials. Finally, this work goes beyond the isotropic
mechanical properties and represents one of the most comprehensive
and exhaustive studies of some of the most important UHTCs, charting
their anisotropy and thermal and thermodynamical properties.