Question: how can breaking plates and listening to them affect us in the future?

Andy Norton answered on 13 Jun 2011:

Interesting question!

The idea of my research (i.e. smashing ceramics) came because people don’t really understand this at the moment. For example, people in the military are making plates to go on the outside of tanks – these are made of ceramics, like the type of thing that you eat off (although a bit more fancy!). So that they can make these as strong and as hard as possible (hard enough to stop bullets from both hand-held guns and maybe even from tanks), people needed to investigate how and why ceramics break when they are hit. If we can work out how they break when smashed (either with a bullet, or in a compressing machine like I use), then maybe we can work out how to make them better.

So, my experiments will hopefully help because we can get a better idea of how these ceramics break up when hit with things, and so we can work out ways to make them stronger, tougher, harder etc., and so we can get better armour for people and for tanks. So even though I am doing a very small aspect of a very big topic, my results should hopefully help get better equipment for soldiers, which is pretty cool.

Away from the military side (although that is obviously an important aspect), learning how these ceramics break and what they sound like when they break could lead to other important technological changes in the future. Ceramics are used in artificial hip-joint, brakes in fast cars, building structures, etc. – if we can understand how these things break, then we can try and make better things in the future.