Question: why are you studying this?

Andy Norton answered on 13 Jun 2011:

Heya!

Do you mean why am I studying this (like, how does the PhD help me?), or why are we looking at this (i.e. why are we interested in this research?)? I’ll try and answer both!

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.

I am also studying this so that I can get my PhD (or Doctor of Philosophy), which is a qualification that you can get after your Uni degree, which should hopefully help me get a better job in the future.