A general scheme of material design and virtual testing of porous ceramics is presented, which provides new strategies for efficient development and optimisation of such materials. The development cycle contains three stages, which can be repeated, until the final targeted properties are reached. The first stage is the preparation of porous ceramics with properties in the region of interest and thorough 3D-investigation and characterization of the porous microstructure. In the second step, microstructure data either directly from real materials or indirectly from a virtual, stochastic model are fed into a numerical model to calculate the physical property of interest, e.g. permeability, diffusivity, thermal conductivity or electrical conductivity of pore fluids. Finally, an evaluation of data representing microstructure characteristics as well as macroscopic properties for a wide range of fabrication scenarios yields as a third step a validated model, which leads to the definition of optimised design guidelines. This optimisation cycle is then closed with the production of a porous ceramic material with improved physical properties. The successful implementation of such scheme is demonstrated here with the development of porous zirconia membranes as electric liquid junction for pH-sensors
