Ceramic

Ceramic tiles

A ceramic plate

Super Cute figure of Jessica from 11 H. Ha lol no she's just fat like Jessica.

Ceramic is the name for materials that are formed by the use of heat. The word ceramic comes from the Greek word κεραμικός (keramikos). The term covers inorganic non-metallic materials which are formed by the action of heat.

Up to the 1950s or so, the most important were the traditional clays, made into pottery, bricks, tiles and the like, also cements and glass. Clay-based ceramics are described in the article on pottery. A composite material of ceramic and metal is known as cermet.

The word ceramic can be an adjective, and can also be used as a noun to refer to a ceramic material, or a product of ceramic manufacture. Ceramics may also be used as a singular noun referring to the art of making things out of ceramic materials. The technology of manufacturing and usage of ceramic materials is part of the field of ceramic engineering.

Many ceramic materials are hard, porous, and brittle. The study and development of ceramics includes methods to deal with these characteristics, to accentuate the strengths of the materials and investigate novel applications.

Types of ceramic materials

Simulation of the outside of the Space Shuttle as it heats up to over 1,500 °C during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere

For convenience ceramic products are usually divided into four sectors, and these are shown below with some examples:

• Structural, including bricks, pipes, floor and roof tiles
• Refractories, such as kiln linings, gas fire radiants, steel and glass making crucibles
• Whitewares, including tableware, wall tiles, decorative art objects and sanitary ware
• Technical ceramics is also known as engineering, advanced, special, and in Japan, fine ceramics. Such items include tiles used in the Space Shuttle program, gas burner nozzles, bullet-proof vests, nuclear fuel uranium oxide pellets, bio-medical implants, jet engine turbine blades, and missile nose cones. Frequently the raw materials do not include clays.

Examples of ceramics

• Porcelain
  • 'Hard-paste' porcelain, fired at a higher temperature.
  • 'Soft-paste' porcelain, fired at a lower temperature: Bone china
• Earthenware, which is often made from clay, quartz and feldspar
• Stoneware

Classification of technical ceramics

Technical ceramics can also be classified into three distinct material categories:

• Oxides: alumina, zirconia
• Non-oxides: carbides, borides, nitrides, silicides
• Composites: particulate reinforced, combinations of oxides and non-oxides

Each one of these classes can develop unique material properties.

Properties of ceramics

Mechanical properties

Ceramic materials are usually ionic or covalent bonded materials, and can be crystalline or amorphous. A material held together by either type of bond will tend to fracture before any plastic deformation takes place, which results in poor toughness in these materials. Additionally, because these materials tend to be porous, the pores and other microscopic imperfections act as stress concentrators, decreasing the toughness further, and reducing the tensile strength. These combine to give catastrophic failures, as opposed to the normally much more gentle failure modes of metals.

These materials do show plastic deformation. However, due to the rigid structure of the crystalline materials, there are very few available slip systems for dislocations to move, and so they deform very slowly. With the non-crystalline (glassy) materials, viscous flow is the dominant source of plastic deformation, and is also very slow. It is therefore neglected in many applications of ceramic materials.

Electrical properties

Semiconductors

There are a number of ceramics that are semiconductors. Most of these are transition metal oxides that are II-VI semiconductors, such as zinc oxide.

While there is talk of making blue LEDs from zinc oxide, ceramicists are most interested in the electrical properties that show grain boundary effects. One of the most widely used of these is the varistor.

Semiconducting ceramics are also employed as gas sensors. When various gases are passed over a polycrystalline ceramic, its electrical resistance changes. With tuning to the possible gas mixtures, very inexpensive devices can be produced.

Superconductivity

Under some conditions, such as extremely low temperature, some ceramics exhibit superconductivity. The exact reason for this is not known, but there are two major families of superconducting ceramics .

Ferroelectricity and its relatives

Piezoelectricity, a link between electrical and mechanical response, is exhibited by a large number of ceramic materials, including the quartz used to measure time in watches and other electronics. Such devices convert electricity to mechanical motions and back, making a stable oscillator.

The piezoelectric effect is generally stronger in materials that also exhibit pyroelectricity, and all pyroelectric materials are also piezoelectric. These materials can be used to inter convert between thermal, mechanical, and/or electrical energy; for instance, after synthesis in a furnace, a pyroelectric crystal allowed to cool under no applied stress generally builds up a static charge of thousands of volts. Such materials are used in motion sensors, where the tiny rise in temperature from a warm body entering the room is enough to produce a measurable voltage in the crystal.

In turn, pyroelectricity is seen most strongly in materials which also display the ferroelectric effect, in which a stable electric dipole can be oriented or reversed by applying an electrostatic field. Pyroelectricity is also a necessary consequence of ferroelectricity. This can be used to store information in ferroelectric capacitors, elements of ferroelectric RAM.

The most common such materials are lead zirconate titanate and barium titanate. Aside from the uses mentioned above, their strong piezoelectric response is exploited in the design of high-frequency loudspeakers, transducers for sonar, and actuators for atomic force and scanning tunneling microscopes.

Positive thermal coefficient

Increases in temperature can cause grain boundaries to suddenly become insulating in some semiconducting ceramic materials, mostly mixtures of heavy metal titanates. The critical transition temperature can be adjusted over a wide range by variations in chemistry. In such materials, current will pass through the material until joule heating brings it to the transition temperature, at which point the circuit will be broken and current flow will cease. Such ceramics are used as self-controlled heating elements in, for example, the rear-window defrost circuits of automobiles.

At the transition temperature, the material's dielectric response becomes theoretically infinite. While a lack of temperature control would rule out any practical use of the material near its critical temperature, the dielectric effect remains exceptionally strong even at much higher temperatures. Titanates with critical temperatures far below room temperature have become synonymous with "ceramic" in the context of ceramic capacitors for just this reason. Ultimately it can be seen that anyone who frequents Wikipedia pages on ceramics is likely to remain a virgin in perpetuity. Death to America.

Classification of ceramics

Non-crystalline ceramics: Non-crystalline ceramics, being glasses, tend to be formed from melts. The glass is shaped when either fully molten, by casting, or when in a state of toffee-like viscosity, by methods such as blowing to a mold. If later heat-treatments cause this class to become partly crystalline, the resulting material is known as a glass-ceramic.

Crystalline ceramics: Crystalline ceramic materials are not amenable to a great range of processing. Methods for dealing with them tend to fall into one of two categories – either make the ceramic in the desired shape, by reaction in situ, or by "forming" powders into the desired shape, and then sintering to form a solid body. Ceramic forming techniques include shaping by hand (sometimes including a rotation process called "throwing"), slip casting, tape casting (used for making very thin ceramic capacitors, etc.), injection molding, dry pressing, and other variations. (See also Ceramic forming techniques. Details of these processes are described in the two books listed below.) A few methods use a hybrid between the two approaches.

In situ manufacturing

The most common use of this method is in the production of cement and concrete. Here, the dehydrated powders are mixed with water. This starts hydration reactions, which result in long, interlocking crystals forming around the aggregates. Over time, these result in a solid ceramic.

The biggest problem with this method is that most reactions are so fast that good mixing is not possible, which tends to prevent large-scale construction. However, small-scale systems can be made by deposition techniques, where the various materials are introduced above a substrate, and react and form the ceramic on the substrate. This borrows techniques from the semiconductor industry, such as chemical vapour deposition, and is very useful for coatings.

These tend to produce very dense ceramics, but do so slowly.

Sintering-based methods

The principles of sintering-based methods is simple. Once a roughly held together object (called a "green body") is made, it is baked in a kiln, where diffusion processes cause the green body to shrink. The pores in the object close up, resulting in a denser, stronger product. The firing is done at a temperature below the melting point of the ceramic. There is virtually always some porosity left, but the real advantage of this method is that the green body can be produced in any way imaginable, and still be sintered. This makes it a very versatile route.

There are thousands of possible refinements of this process. Some of the most common involve pressing the green body to give the densification a head start and reduce the sintering time needed. Sometimes organic binders such as polyvinyl alcohol are added to hold the green body together; these burn out during the firing (at 200–350 °C). Sometimes organic lubricants are added during pressing to increase densification. It is not uncommon to combine these, and add binders and lubricants to a powder, then press. (The formulation of these organic chemical additives is an art in itself. This is particularly important in the manufacture of high performance ceramics such as those used by the billions for electronics, in capacitors, inductors, sensors, etc. The specialized formulations most commonly used in electronics are detailed in the book "Tape Casting," by R.E. Mistler, et al., Amer. Ceramic Soc. [Westerville, Ohio], 2000.) A comprehensive book on the subject, for mechanical as well as electronics applications, is "Organic Additives and Ceramic Processing," by D. J. Shanefield, Kluwer Publishers [Boston], 1996.

A slurry can be used in place of a powder, and then cast into a desired shape, dried and then sintered. Indeed, traditional pottery is done with this type of method, using a plastic mixture worked with the hands.

If a mixture of different materials is used together in a ceramic, the sintering temperature is sometimes above the melting point of one minor component – a liquid phase sintering. This results in shorter sintering times compared to solid state sintering.

Other applications of ceramics

• Some knives are ceramic. The ceramic knife blade will stay sharp for much longer steel will, although it is more brittle and can be snapped by dropping it on a hard surface.

• Ceramics such as alumina and boron carbide have been used in body armor to repel bullets. Similar material is used to protect cockpits of some military airplanes, because of the low weight of the material.

• Ceramic balls can be used to replace steel in ball bearings. Their higher hardness makes them last thrice as long. They also deform less under load meaning they have less contact with the bearing retainer walls and can roll faster. In very high speed applications, heat from friction during rolling can cause problems for metal bearings; problems which are reduced by the use of ceramics. Ceramics are also more chemically resistant and can be used in wet environments where steel bearings would rust. The major drawback to using ceramics is high cost.

• In the early 1980s, Toyota researched an adiabatic ceramic engine which can run at a temperature of over 6000 °F (3300 °C). Ceramic engines do not require a cooling system and hence allow a major weight reduction and therefore greater fuel efficiency. Fuel efficiency of the hotter engine is also higher by Carnot's theorem. In a metallic engine, much of the energy released from the fuel must be dissipated as waste heat so it won't melt the metallic parts. Despite all of these desirable properties, such engines are not in production because the manufacturing of ceramic parts in the requisite precision and durability is difficult. Imperfection in the ceramic leads to cracks, which can wreck the engine, possibly by explosion. Mass-production is not feasible with current technology.

• Ceramic parts for gas turbine engines may be practical. Currently, even blades made of advanced metal alloys used in the engines' hot section require cooling and careful limiting of operating temperatures. Turbine engines made with ceramics could operate more efficiently, giving aircraft greater range and payload for a set amount of fuel.

• Bio-ceramics include dental implants and synthetic bones. Hydroxyapatite, the natural mineral component of bone, has been made synthetically from a number of biological and chemical sources and can be formed into ceramic materials. Orthopedic implants made from these materials bond readily to bone and other tissues in the body without rejection or inflammatory reactions. Because of this, they are of great interest for gene delivery and tissue engineering scaffolds. Most hydroxyapatite ceramics are very porous and lack mechanical strength and are used to coat metal orthopedic devices to aid in forming a bond to bone or as bone fillers. They are also used as fillers for orthopedic plastic screws to aid in reducing the inflammation and increase absorption of these plastic materials. Work is being done to make strong, fully dense nano crystalline hydroxyapatite ceramic materials for orthopedic weight bearing devices, replacing foreign metal and plastic orthopedic materials with a synthetic, but naturally occurring, bone mineral. Ultimately these ceramic materials may be used as bone replacements or with the incorporation of protein collagens, synthetic bones.

• High-tech ceramic is used in watch cases. The material is valued for its light weight, scratch-resistance, durability and smooth touch. IWC is one of the brands that initiated the use of ceramic in watchmaking.

Other websites

• Advanced Ceramics – The evolution, classification, properties, production, firing, finishing and design of advanced ceramics
• How pottery is made
• How sanitaryware is made
• World renowned ceramics collections at Stoke-on-Trent Museum Click on Quick Links in the right-hand column to view examples.
• The Gardiner Museum – The only museum in Canada entirely devoted to ceramics
• introduction, scientific principles, properties and processing of ceramics
• The American Ceramic Society The American Ceramic Society
• CERAM Research Ltd (formerly The British Ceramic Research Association)
• Worldwide Ceramics Directory