Cat litter has another use??

In ancient times potters did not have clay suppliers to provide them with raw materials for their glazes and clay bodies. They had to find, collect and process all the materials that they needed to produce their pottery from their local environment. This may have meant digging clay from the river bank, grinding up feldspar from an outcropping or collecting ashes from the fire pit. The result was that potters in one area had distinctly different clay and glazes from potters only a hundred miles away.

Today, because of private property laws, it is more difficult to run out and start mining local clay from your neighbor’s yard. But there are other sources of ceramic raw materials available to the modern potters that are both locally available and already processed. They are in the products we use everyday, which are sold in hardware, grocery or discount super stores.

These materials are similar to the ones that our ancestors used for their clay and glazes but they are processed for other uses that are more relevant to our daily societal needs, like antacids, cat litter, sunscreen, toothpaste, etc. The trade off is that, although we may not be getting the same regionally unique materials our ancestors did, we do have a readily available source of uniformly processed raw materials with little or no effort. We just have to have our credit cards available. Using products intended for other uses to create glazes, a potter can still come up with a unique and interesting palate of colors and surfaces and at the same time learn about material properties and their interactions in glazes.

It seems there is no limit to the use of ceramics in technology, be it for peaceful purposes or otherwise. Ultrahard ceramic layers are built into the steel in tank bodies. When a projectile penetrates a layer, it pulverizes the ceramic, breaking the bonds that bind the molecules together. This chemical change causes the ceramic fragments to expand. In expanding, they grind up the softer material of the projectile, making it inoperative.