Question: How do you smash the ceramics? Have you got a machiene or do you just drop them onto a table?

Andy Norton answered on 13 Jun 2011:

We have a lovely, sophisticated machine. There is a picture of it on my profile – did you see it? (I don’t know how to paste it into here!). It’s called an Instron 5582, and it can be used to compress samples up to 100, 000N (or 10 tonnes), so it is a pretty hefty bit of kit. I place my sample (which is about 2mm x 3mm x 1mm block) under a hardended steel piston, and that is pushed down by the machine onto the block. I have a little microphone attached to the same plate that the ceramic is on, and that records the noise during the test. Depending on what sort of test that I want to do, I will either compress them until the break – they fracture into lots of little chunks which cause sparks when they hit the metal, or little bits of dust – or I will stop them before they fail. With the unfailed samples, I can then look at them in various ways using different bits of kit.