While most are familiar with ceramics and glass,they are much more than pottery,dishes,and window window glass.Ceramic and glass materials enable advanced technologies-sometimes as components in devices,sometimes as materials necessary for manufacturing other materials.
Components include catalytic converter substrates for your car,fiber optic glasses that bring the inter -net to,light bulbs,and dental crowns.Behind the scenes,refractory ceramics line steelmaking furnaces and cement kilns,draw heat out of your cell phone,and project jet engines during flight.
Broadly speaking,ceramic materials are nonmetallic,inorganic materials,that is,not metals,not plast -ics,not organic chemicals.Compounds such as oxides,nitrides,carbides,and borides are generally consi -dered ceramic materials.Glasses are amorphous materials with a wide composition ranges.However, most commerical glasses are silicate or borosilicate bases compositions.
