Data-Driven Study of Preceramic Polymers for SiC Composites with Emphasis on Curing Behavior and Ceramic Yield

The design of polymer-derived silicon carbide (SiC) composites has largely relied on trial and error, as decades of foundational studies remain scattered across unstructured literature. This fragmentation has hindered systematic efforts to resolve a central conflict in the development of SiC composites: achieving effective curing at low temperatures (≤140 °C) without compromising the high ceramic yield needed to ensure structural integrity, thermal stability, and dimensional retention during processing. To address this, we developed a data-extraction pipeline that combines optical character recognition (OCR) with large language models (LLMs) to create a curated data set covering 284 publications. These publications represent the majority of the accessible English-language literature reporting curing and pyrolysis conditions for polymer-derived ceramic (PDC) systems used in SiC-matrix composite processing, covering polycarbosilanes, polysilazanes, polysiloxanes, and their modified derivatives, with polycarbosilane systems forming the dominant subset. By consolidating decades of dispersed experimental data into a single structured resource, this work enables quantitative analyses and modeling efforts that were previously not possible. This structured data set allowed us to identify key trends and build predictive models. Analysis of the data set showed two main approaches: high-temperature curing and catalyst-assisted curing. A supervised learning model was trained to predict low-temperature curing pathways with 89% accuracy, demonstrating that systematic data aggregation can reveal reproducible curing behavior across chemically diverse precursors. Our analysis of experimental data from the literature shows a clear trade-off: lowering the curing temperature often comes at the cost of reduced ceramic yield. To better understand this relationship, we developed practical design guidelines that help balance processability and performance in SiC composite systems.