Question: where did you get the idea to smash ceramics and what are your favourite aspects of doing this?

Andy Norton answered on 10 Jun 2011:

Hey guys!

The idea of 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.

The reason that we are listening to the noise that they make it because it might be able to tell us something about how it is breaking. It could be that there are tiny cracks forming inside before it breaks, or it could be deforming (like producing deformation twins – did you see the picture of this that I put on my profile?), or it could be doing something else. So that we don’t have to cut the sample open each time to work out how they broke, we could use the noise that they make to work out what is going on.

So, yeh, it’s basically to try and get better armour for tanks!

My favourite aspect? Tough question! In terms of experimental work, my favourite aspect is probably the microscopy stuff that I do. I do a lot of transmission electron microscopy (or TEM). So, this is like a normal microscope that you’ve probably used before, but rather than using light it uses electrons. So these electrons come down a big chamber, and through my sample. When they go through my sample, they get bent a bit (it’s like when you’ve been swimming. Ever noticed when you have your head outside the water, that when you try to grab something that it is in the water you miss? It’s because the light is shifted a little bit. It’s sort of like what happens in this microscope). They electron then come down, and I can see my image. I get to see stuff which is 300, 000 or 400, 000 times bigger than it is in reality, meaning that I get to look at some pretty tiny bits of deformation! So, that’s probably my favourite technique. But my favourite overall aspect is when everything sort of comes together – when I can tie together all my different techniques and results, and end up with an answer. That’s very exciting.