🌟 Shattering a 10000-Year-Old Ceramic Recipe with Claire Dancer: Episode 197 of Under the Microscope 🔬

What to Expect:

In this episode, Claire Dancer delves into her groundbreaking research on ceramics. Claire shares her journey from studying materials science in the UK to leading research at the University of Warwick. She discusses her work on re-engineering ancient ceramic recipes to create advanced materials with new properties.

About the Guest:

🌟 Key Takeaways from This Episode:

• Ceramics Research: Innovating ancient ceramic recipes to create advanced materials.
• Career Journey: From studying materials science in the UK to leading groundbreaking research at Warwick.
• Favorite Experiment: Re-engineering ancient ceramic recipes for modern applications.

🔬 In This Episode, We Cover:

Claire’s Research :

Claire’s research focuses on innovating ancient ceramic recipes. By understanding the composition and methods used in historical ceramics, she aims to create advanced materials with new properties for modern applications.

Claire’s Career Journey :

Claire’s academic journey began with a Bachelor’s in Materials Science in the UK. She pursued her passion for ceramics, leading her to conduct innovative research at the University of Warwick. Her diverse experiences have enriched her research perspectives and expertise.

Claire’s Favourite Research Experiment :

Claire’s favorite experiment involves re-engineering ancient ceramic recipes for modern applications. By studying historical ceramic techniques, she aims to develop new materials with unique properties that can be used in various industries.

Life as a Scientist – Beyond the Lab:
Claire values the collaborative nature of scientific research and enjoys engaging with the global scientific community. She is passionate about teaching and mentoring the next generation of scientists and values the opportunity to work in a cutting-edge field.

Claire’s 3 Wishes

1. Increased funding for research: Claire wishes for more financial support to advance innovative research projects.
2. Greater collaboration between researchers: She advocates for stronger partnerships to enhance knowledge sharing and collaborative efforts in research.
3. Improved public understanding of scientific research: Claire emphasizes the importance of public awareness and support for scientific advancements.

Claire’s Time on @RealSci_Nano:

Claire will be taking over the RealSci_Nano Twitter account to share her research on ceramics. Followers can expect to learn about the innovative techniques and materials her work focuses on, as well as insights into the future of materials science.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi, just recorded a podcast with Claire Dancer, who is a researcher at the University of Warwick in the UK. And, oh my God, her research is so cool. Oh my God, her research is all about ceramics and how to make ceramics at like, low temperatures and wow, what a journey she has had and the current work she’s doing.

Ah, everything, everything. We talked about so many things and the unusual places where you can find ceramics. And, uh, yeah, so can’t wait for you to watch the episode about revolutionizing the No, not 100. Sorry. Uh, shattering the 10, 000 year old, um, cooking recipe of ceramics. So yeah, stay tuned to watch the episode.

All right. Bye.

Hi, everyone. I am Pranothi, your host of Under the Microscope podcast. And today we have with us Claire [00:01:00] Dancer, who is a reader at University of Warwick, which is In the middle of England. Hi, Claire. Welcome to under the microscope. How are you? I’m good. Thank you. Thank you for having me on the on the podcast.

Happy to have you before I get into your science. What’s a reader? Claire, we are all readers, we can all read. Yeah, I know. I’ve gone through quite a lot of my career to now be able to call myself a reader. I did think I qualified rather younger. Um, but yes, a reader is a, is sort of the third rung of the ladder in the UK system.

Um, the UK academic sort of system is in a bit of flux right now and everyone’s calling things by different names. We always used to have lecturer as your first academic post, then senior lecturer, then reader, and then professor. So reader is kind of sub professor. Um, we don’t actually call them that anymore.

Even in my university, we have assistant professor, associate professor, then reader, and then professor. Um, so it’s all [00:02:00] changing, but yeah, that’s basically where I am. Below professor, but above associate prof. Okay, but then if it is like associate professor, professor, professor, And then your end goal is like a full professor.

Why is there still a reader? That doesn’t make any sense to me. Well, welcome to universities in the UK. It’s just a, it’s a, it’s a historical thing. And a lot of universities getting rid of it, even in the UK. So, um, in Cambridge, for example, that. This rank is now junior professor. So it’s sort of that idea that you’re going up But it comes from the fact that we used to always have Um a single professor in a department and that changed about 15 years ago And there were lots more professors, but it always used to be there was one professor They were the head of department and that was it NVIDA was sort of the subgrade that was sort of the people in waiting sort of the deputies And everyone else was basically senior lecturer and lecturer Um, but it has changed and it’s sort of seen as a A step on the boot up to being full professor.

Ah, okay, so next time, hopefully soon, when you’re taking over the account, you will be a professor. Fingers crossed. Who will have [00:03:00] her own readers to read scientific papers for her, sorry. Ah, that’s the dream, yes, people to read for me. Because you can’t be bothered with reading when you’re a professor.

That’s why you have readers. You’re supposed to know everything by then, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Okay, alright. So, uh, it’s a historic thing. Okay, okay, that’s interesting. And speaking of history, uh, you were telling me a bit about, uh, the connection between India and Warwick. There is this special connection.

So please tell me about it again. Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I’m a, I’m based in a department of the university. That’s confusingly called the Warwick Manufacturing Group. The Warwick Manufacturing Group started off as a research group in the school of engineering at Warwick and, uh, was founded by our founding chairman, uh, Um, he had come over from India as an apprentice, I believe.

So really quite a long time ago, they’d come over to, um, make his career in research and, and teaching in the UK. And he founded the white manufacturing [00:04:00] group to try and bring a little bit of industrial connection into the UK. into universities. So we were founded on that basis that we’d have really close industrial ties.

And we’ve always historically, as I was telling you, had this strong connection to Tata because they were childhood friends. Um, and there’s a really strong connection there between, between the two groups. Um, so yeah, my department has really close ties to India. Um, I think some of the, My department heads are out there right now talking to Indian institutions and we have a really great link to IIT Khargapur, where they send students over quite regularly, which is a really nice thing.

So there is that strong link. Um, sadly Lord Bhattacharya passed away in 2018. Um, but I think in the time since then, we’ve still cemented that relationship that we have that really close to home, um, and, and have that really good link. Into india and everything everything tata. So tata steel and gel are really close connections to my department Ah, that is so nice to hear tata is like a big big prestigious [00:05:00] Brand, it’s not a brand.

I think it’s an emotion in india. If you say tata, it’s like Yeah, it’s from salt to tractors. Uh, everything, uh, is, uh, from Tata. I mean, we have, it’s so, it’s so heartwarming to speak with someone who is at a university or at a department, uh, which has close connections with Tata. It’s so cool. Oh my God.

This podcast is even more special now for me. Um, all right. So, um, Kerry, you mentioned you’re at the Department of Manufacturing group at the University of Warwick. So, uh, what is your research? Could you explain it to us in super simple words, please? Sure. So my research focuses on ceramic processing.

Ceramic materials are incredibly useful materials that get overlooked quite a lot because people think they’re very brittle. break really easily. Um, but actually we all use ceramics all the time. Not only mugs and plates and all those sort of common everyday objects, but ceramics are in all of our light fittings.

They’re [00:06:00] in all of our plug sockets. They are materials that can withstand very high temperatures and don’t conduct electricity. And metals and polymers don’t do that. You can’t substitute in for ceramics. If you need a ceramic, you always need it. So that’s why I was sort of interested in, in ceramics historically.

But the challenge with the ceramic material is absolutely how do you process it? Traditional ceramic processing, you have to take up the material, you make the material from a powder. Uh, so you make say a pellet or, or a little shape that you’re gonna, gonna then fire. You put it into a furnace. You take that furnace way above a thousand degrees.

So we’re heating something like aluminium oxide. We’re probably going up to 1600 degrees for a day. not a day at temperature, but up and down and the furnace takes time to go up and down. And then we end up with our nice dense ceramics been densified by solid state diffusion. So it needs a lot of energy to, to do that, to move the pieces around.

And then we have something really robust that we can use, but that’s a huge energy [00:07:00] consumption in that process. We’re going up to high temperatures. We’re doing it for a long time. We’re heating a lot of space around the material, um, not just the material itself. And so in the last sort of 10 to 20 years, a lot of processes have emerged.

Um, and people are looking at how do we bring these temperatures down? How do we reduce the energy that’s needed in ceramic processing? Because if we don’t, we can’t, the ceramics industry can’t hit their emissions targets. The cost is going to continue to be absolutely huge. And Ceramics won’t be able to be used.

So within my group, I sort of think of us as tackling two main challenges. The first one is around energy use in the ceramic industry, energy use in making ceramic parts. Um, because we know 90 percent of the energy in the lifetime of a ceramic is used in manufacturing it. So there’s a big win there. If you can reduce the temperature, the energy, the time, there’s a big win.

Um, and we also know from research that was done, while we can do things like [00:08:00] pay ceramic manufacturers to change their gas kilns that are often sort of 40 years old. Very long standing technology that keeps working for a very long time. We can pay them to change those to electricity and then they can run on renewables and that’s great but it doesn’t actually solve the problem.

It doesn’t bring the energy use down enough. So, from a research perspective, working on low energy, next generation ceramic processing technologies has a real win from an energy perspective. And there’s another thing that we work on, which comes from, sort of, history of my interests and what, what I’m kind of interested in personally, which is that often people resist using ceramics in devices because they can’t process them to full density.

If you’re making a solid state battery, you have layers of material, all joined together. You’ve got a metal current collector. You’ve got electrodes, which are probably made of some kind of pseudo ceramic, but doesn’t need to be fully dense. So it’s probably okay. You have polymer separators and binders, and then traditionally you would have your liquid electrolytes swimming around in there.

If you’re going to, make that solid instead, [00:09:00] and you want it to be dense and to have really good energy capacity, and to be safe, which is one of the major reasons we want to use solid state batteries, you have to sinter that ceramic to high density. And the sintering temperatures of those ceramics are no different to the other ceramics.

above a thousand degrees. You take a piece of aluminium current collector up to a thousand degrees and you don’t have your current collector anymore, your polymer is long gone. So you can’t do it and people resist doing it and they do things like they’ll stick the ceramic together with polymer and make a sort of sticky goo.

But then you don’t get the properties that you really wanted from using the ceramic and it starts to be questionable, is it worth it? So one of the other major challenges we have is to think about can we find methods by which we can densify ceramics, get those high temperature properties, the really dense ceramic parts, but do it all at much lower temperatures.

So we’ve been pushing our temperatures down and down as far as we can go with a couple of different methods. Um, but they, they drive to temperature down below the melting temperatures of metals and some of them drive for temperature down below the melting temperature of the polymer as well. So it’s a really kind of.

There’s really compelling reasons to work on this research. Um, and yeah, we have a whole toolbox of things to bring to the table to, [00:10:00] to try, um, and apply to lots of different applications. Oh, that sounds so cool. Oh my God. I don’t think we’ve had many, like, at least I don’t recall, uh, learning like in the, in those, like in these five or 10 minutes that we are talking, I’ve learned more about ceramics than I did over the course of, let’s say last 10 years.

So thank you very much for that. This is so fascinating. The world of ceramics. My personal mission to educate people. There’s not many of us around. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And, And you also mentioned that, uh, ceramics, so when you say ceramics, you’re absolutely right. The first things that come to my mind is my coffee mug or my plate, or I don’t know, you mentioned like in the, in the sockets, the electric, electricity sockets, we have ceramics.

What are the most unusual or the wildest places where we can find [00:11:00] ceramics that we don’t even know, like in day to day life, for example? Oh, that’s a really interesting question. There’s loads of them. Um, and actually, when I teach ceramics, um, I teach it from applications. Mm-Hmm. . So we teach all the properties of ceramics, but from an application basis.

So I’ll take you through a few of them. So the most exciting one to many people is ceramic armor. People don’t think you can use arm, you can make armor out of a ceramic. ’cause it’ll just break. Right. It breaks so easily. But actually a ceramic. Sorry, what’s an arm like? Like the, like the shield? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so like soldiers, most soldiers wear a chest plate and a helmet which is made of ceramic. And yeah, and they have to be told not to stand on them because that is not good for them. But yeah, it is inserts into the vest and it’s made out of silicon carbide. The helmets are normally made out of boron carbide because it’s lighter.

But yeah, they’re made of ceramics because ceramics are the best at defeating bullets. And actually, if you want an armor system, you don’t want. The equivalent of a ceramic armor breastplate would be a chunk of steel, a thick, thick chunk of steel. It would be at least three or four times as heavy, and the soldiers already carry enough, like they need something light and effective.

And why does, [00:12:00] why do ceramics work as armor? Because ceramics are harder than the bullets that are coming in. So in that dynamic moment, when a ceramic is hit by a bullet, it dissipates the energy and it either wears the bullet away, because if it’s in a metal case in particular, the Essentially, you’ve got a friction action and it wears it away.

Um, or they take all the energy and absorb it and the bullet just falls away. So you’re either destroying it or you’re taking the energy out one way or another. And they’re normally put into systems. So the ceramic part is called a disruptor. So it’s the thing that sort of defeats the threat. There’s also absorber layers, which are things like Kevlar and polymer, which absorb the energy.

more effectively. But yeah, they are very, very effective as armor. So all tanks have arm ceramic armor all over them. It’s a really big area.

But it’s not something people expect because ceramics break really easily, but they don’t, they don’t break really easily in certain situations. Ceramics are incredibly strong under compression. And whenever people tell me ceramics are weak, I say, what’s your house built of? your house is built of ceramics.

No. Your house is, your house is bricks of ceramics. No way. I really am teaching you something. [00:13:00] Bricks of all ceramics. And why is the, you know, the story of the three little pigs, my kids love the story of the three little pigs. Why do we end up with a ceramic building? Not one made of sticks and not one made of straw?

Because the bricks are really, really strong when they’re in compression. You take a piece of ceramic and you, you try and bend it like this. Yeah, it’s going to break. It’s going to break. You try and stretch it. It’s going to break. You put it under compression. No, it’s fine. It’s happy. It’s absolutely fine because the way that a ceramic breaks is you form a microscopic flaw, a little bit of porosity, a tiny little bit of crack opening, a little defect in the structure, and the flaw comes from that.

But it has to be pulled open. You have to pull it open somehow. So if you don’t have any tension in your system. It’s really, really strong and they’re really durable and they’ll outlast us. So yeah, I love that I’ve showed you. Oh my God. You’re absolutely right. Yeah. Bricks.

Oh my God. Oh my God. Yeah. Ceramics are not brutal. Well, they can be brutal. But they’re not. They’re not weak. They’re not weak. Yeah. That’s They’re not weak. [00:14:00] They’re not. There is. There is no way that you can describe a ceramic as weak because they’re the strongest materials in many ways that we know.

Diamonds are ceramics. Now people forget that. No, they’re stones. No. Stones are ceramics.

Everything is ceramics. No, not everything is ceramics, but lots of useful things are ceramics. So, so that’s one example. Another example, um, which is quite different is that we can make knives out of ceramics. And if you make a knife out of zirconia, um, zirconium oxide, it will last without sharpening. So long as you don’t snap it again.

Don’t go in with something, you know, really, really hard, cutting up your really, really hard vegetables or something and twist the knife, then you’re in trouble. But if not, it will stay sharp for a very, very long time because they’re very, very durable and they’re much, much harder than anything you would use it on.

So, ceramic knife is a great investment, if anyone’s looking for investment opportunities by, you know, or [00:15:00] wedding presents, it’s a great thing to buy, um, although people don’t like buying knives for people, do they? So, it’s kind of funny, um, but yeah, and lots of other applications. So, huge applications in abrasives, all the abrasives we use are ceramics, um, so polishing wheels, grinding wheels, all of those kind of things.

metallurgical preparation tools. Lots and lots of applications to ceramics in biomaterials. So, you know, if anyone’s been unfortunate enough to have a replacement tooth, a full tooth replacement, that will now be made of zirconia rather than, um, colored, metal and things because it matches the teeth better and it’s more durable.

Um, also hip implants and other joint replacements tend to be made ceramics and that’s because they’re pretty inert. So they don’t react with the body tissues and they give a good, um, compatibility with the body and they’re not perfect, but they’re, they’re better than a lot of the alternatives. So it’s, yeah, there’s a huge raft of applications, structural and functional.

I hadn’t, didn’t really touch on the functional there, but so structural would be anything where it’s a load bearing mechanical application. Or underwear or whatever. Functional would be more like, it’s in a, um, a device. It’s in a battery, it’s in a [00:16:00] capacitor or superconductor or magnets. An awful lot of magnets of ceramics.

Um, oh wow. It’s a, but it’s an interesting. In many ways it’s a, ceramic can be a very difficult thing to define. Um, and that sort of almost leads to how interesting they are. Um, but really ceramics have a particular type of mechanical behavior that’s non predictable. That’s what really defines a ceramic from a material science perspective.

You know, that’s what I learned as an undergrad was metals have a predictable failure stress. Polymers have a predictable transition from elasticity to pleats. Plasticity. We can plot that out. Ceramics are going to break when they want to break. Because they break from these microscopic floors, you don’t know when they’re going to break, what’s going to cause the fracture.

So you buy a piece of ceramic from, from a supplier and they’ll tell you this is what we think it is, and it’ll give you a statistical distribution on what the strength of the material is. And that’s what makes something a ceramic. It’s that unpredictability and it’s, and it’s fractured behavior, but that’s not what we use it for quite often.

Um, so it’s, uh, it does give rise to this absolute world of applications that we can use them for. Oh, wow. That is so cool. That is so cool. Oh my God. Oh my God. Okay. Claire, tell me, how did you become? [00:17:00] the ceramics expert. Like, tell me about your career journey. How, how did you become this, in my head, you’re like the ceramic queen.

Like if I have any questions about ceramics, I’m going to come to Claire, the ceramic queen. So how did you, how did you end up in Warwick being a reader and ceramic queen? Um, okay, I will, I, let me start where, where should I go back to, but I’ll go back to, um, I grew up in South Wales. Um, I lived near Cardiff, went to school there.

Um, and I was always really interested in science. Like my dad was a scientist who was microbiologist and he worked at Cardiff Uni. And I always had that kind of knocking around in my life, which is very, very interesting. Very, um, fortunate really, because it does change how you sort of approach things and what you think you can do.

So I felt like I had a massive rebellious streak and decided I was much more interested in physics and engineering than, uh, than biology. Biology seemed a bit, bit of a pain. You had to go to the lab in the night and turn things off and all this. Yeah, physics was much more interesting. So I used to do lots of things at school.

I did the, um, sort of [00:18:00] engineering courses, various things I’d go off and do, and lots of sort of Astrophysics. I really wanted to be an astrophysicist. I always wanted to work for NASA, but you said you were, it was always the dream to work for Tata in India. It’s like, go and work for NASA. That’s what you want to do.

I’m not there yet, but you know, you never know. Um, but yeah, but as I went through school, I studied, uh, sciences, specializing sciences for a level and applied to Cambridge and at Cambridge, you apply for natural sciences. You don’t do a specific science degree. So my list of places to apply to was like Cambridge, natural sciences, and then physics everywhere else.

It was all physics, physics, physics, and much to my surprise, I got in, which was fantastic. barrier one crossed. And when I went off there, I started natural sciences, chose physics, chemistry, you had to do maths. And then I had one more and I thought I’ll do material sciences. That sounds interesting. That sounds like something I don’t know much about.

It’s kind of engineering y. I’d had two minds about doing engineering or physics. And, um, yeah, it took me about four weeks. Terms that came for just eight weeks, halfway through. I was like, you know, I want to do [00:19:00] materials. Materials is much more interesting. And I think actually, you know, The truth of it was, it was the bits I found interesting in A level physics.

It was things like Hooke’s Law and Young’s Modulus and the affirmation of materials. But that was all physics at school, so I would never have known about material science. If I hadn’t gone to Cambridge, I would have gone to another university and done physics. And probably wouldn’t be here. So that’s right.

That’s the first sort of compelling thing. So after that, I could specialize in materials for most of the time. I think second year I did material science. I did minimal, minimal sciences, which was basically crystallography, which was quite interesting thing that they still offered then. I don’t know that they do now.

And I did fluid mechanics because I thought, okay, well, I’ll know about the solids and then I’ll know about the fluids. That seems like a good, good thing. balance. And then I specialized in material science for the last two years. And during that time, I did some, some placements and some summer jobs. I went to ETH in Zurich and I spent a summer with Erasmus when we could still do Erasmus, much to my dismay.

We’ve now lost that with Brexit. Um, I went out to the Surface Science Lab and worked for a professor called [00:20:00] Nick Spencer, and he was a Cambridge grad. Um, I think he liked having me around ’cause he could talk in like British English to me instead of talking to all his, um, Swiss colleagues. And, um, I realized that actually what they were doing was really interesting.

You know, I was using the microscopes, I was trying to work out how to make a, a, um, graded structure on a, on a surface film. We would basically template a. It’s chemical structure and put a polymer over the top and make it segregate according to the underlying template and then peel it off. And of course, in eight weeks, you don’t care anymore.

But, um, but, you know, we tried and it was really interesting. And I think coming at the end of my, that was the summer between third and fourth year of my undergrad. And it was the perfect time that made me realize, yeah, this is what I’d like to do. I’d like to do a PhD. I’d like to go and do a PhD somewhere.

So I was quite fortunate to find my PhD. I think it was quite serendipitous that I actually found it, but I’d done my third year project, individual project, with Judith McManus Driscoll, who’d only recently come up to Cambridge, so I was very lucky in lots of ways, and she offered a project looking [00:21:00] at a material called magnesium diboride.

And magnesium diboride is a superconductor. It was only found to be a superconductor in 2001, and Compared to most superconductors, anyone who’s looked at a chemical structure for a superconductor that’s a high temperature, modern one, it’s four or five elements, it’s non stoichiometric, it’s this very specific composition that you have to get just right, and then you get a great superconductor, fine.

Magnesium toluene comes in a in a jar. You could buy it from Alfa Resa. You could buy it very cheaply then. You can’t buy it very cheaply now. Uh, it used to be very, very cheap. Um, and it’s just two elements put together. So why on earth does this superconduct at 39 Kelvin? You know, an industrial compatible temperature, we can take a cryocooler down to 39 Kelvin easily.

And there was an absolute explosion of research in that field. So I did this short project with Judith on that and looking at different structures and looking at things. And then I happened to see an advert for a PhD at Oxford on the same topic. And I was like, yes, this is what I want to do. So I thought, okay, I can move to [00:22:00] Oxford.

That’s not a big deal. Like, that’s fine. I’m. fed up with Cambridge anyway. Um, it’s, no, I just, everyone was leaving and taking proper jobs. And I thought, okay, I’ll leave as well and go somewhere not very different, but, uh, but different enough. And so I moved over there and I spent four years, um, on a project called ceramic processing of magnesium double iodide.

And in many ways, that’s where it starts. I think I was really interested in ceramics from my undergrad studies. They just seemed like the most interesting materials to work on compared to the others, not doing everything else down. But to me, they were. the most interesting because they were awkward and difficult and it was a challenge to work on them.

So I spent four years working on this material. Magnesium diboride reacts with water, so you can’t do lots of processing. It oxidizes like crazy, so you can’t do loads of processing. So there was lots of like working around all these problems and challenges and eventually came to the conclusion that you need.

high pressure and high temperature, and you need a very, very protective environment because the moment you form magnesium oxide, which it wants to very easily, you start killing the superconductivity in the system. And so I learned about things like the importance of getting a connected structure. It’s not just about gluing the particles together with something [00:23:00] else.

You’ve got to actually connect the two particles together and make a proper grain boundary, not just that glue sort of thing. Um, and, and that was really interesting, but after four years I was a bit fed up of annoying system and thought, okay, I’ll go and work on some normal ceramics. And I was lucky enough to get a project working on ceramic armor, which is what I know about ceramic armor.

And that was working on more conventional oxides and some carbides. And we looked at, uh, constructing some tests for slower than ballistic, but still dynamic testing and things like that. And looking at how things break. Um, Ceramics react very differently to a dynamic impact than to a static impact. It’s because there’s not enough time for the cracks to grow.

So lots of cracks grow at once, and so you get a lot of internal damage in the system. We found a method using a sort of modified Vermont spectroscopy. We could map out the, um, we could use that to map out the residual stress and the plastic deformation that was caused by this micro cracking in the system.

So for One major question in ceramic armor is can we [00:24:00] make armor which can be hit multiple times? Because obviously that’s a build challenge. If it’s been hit, you can’t replace it in the field. So what do you do? Um, and it is really challenging. It’s really hard to make things multi hit reliably. Um, The practical solution to this is make all your armor tiles very small.

And then if one gets hit, it’s not such a problem, but, uh, I don’t think we really solved that one, but we, we worked out a method to understand it better. Um, yeah, the project was understanding and improving ceramic armor, and I think we understood it, but I’m not sure we improved it very much. Um, but yeah.

Understanding is the first step. Absolutely, you know, we got there, but yeah, the other bit was a stretch goal. Um, but yeah, but it was such an interesting project to work on it. And in many ways, it made me a proper ceramicist because I was working on the conventional materials, not the weird ones. Um, and so that, that gave me a bit more sort of, um, interest in ceramics, but a project then came up.

I wanted to another postdoc, um, wasn’t quite ready to sort of look for proper academic jobs at that point, but I still wasn’t completely convinced that’s what I wanted to do, I think, at that point. But so I moved to another postdoc which came available, which was on [00:25:00] metamaterials. And this is really sort of, um, had quite a major impact on me now, uh, thinking about metamaterials and these structured materials, which are so interesting.

There’s structures of materials that have these unique properties or unusual properties, certainly properties that the The parent materials don’t have that’s a really key thing with metamaterials and figuring out ways to make them. Um, was quite an interesting exercise and it led me to doing some polymer processing for the first time, which I hadn’t ever done before, but we were incorporating ceramics into the polymer to then to then make a structured metamaterial in different ways with 3D printing and with molding and different approaches like that.

Um, and it was really interesting. It sort of felt a little bit like giving up, like why aren’t we doing the ceramic processing, why aren’t we trying the ceramic method? It sort of felt like that was too hard, it was easier to make things by polymer routes, and that is something I’d get behind, but there are applications where you want a ceramic still, and where you’re still interested in that.

And so that sort of is where I went on into this sort of independent academic job. So I saw an advert for a job at Warwick. I was looking for jobs. My [00:26:00] husband and I were looking for jobs in the same place, or at least roughly the same place would have been great. Um, and I saw this job at Warwick and I thought, okay, that’s not too far from Oxford.

Actually, it’s about an hour away. It’s, it would be doable even if we don’t both move. So let’s apply. And not much to my surprise, I got an interview. Um, and I went up there and It was a bit strange because Warwick doesn’t have a materials department. So I thought, uh, I’d always been in places with a materials department, you know, and that’s where my natural home was.

That’s where I thought I would, would be. But when I came up here, it turned out I was being interviewed by someone who was a metallurgist who’d come to Warwick from Imperial, who was very much a material scientist. And that kind of gave me a little bit of faith that actually, maybe this is where the material science is.

Is is in the manufacturing department in the world manufacturing group. So, uh, yeah, long story short. I came up here in 2013. It’s almost been 10 years, which is a bit crazy. Came up as assistant PFOS and started my group. And it took me a little while, um, to figure out what I wanted to do. It wasn’t, Completely straightforward to me that I wanted to just do ceramics, and I [00:27:00] still keep a bit of an interest in polymers because that experience of sometimes it’s easier to do a polymer processing is still, it’s still a compelling argument to me, you can get the functionality of the ceramic, but the ease of processing of the polymer, and that is still something we still do in the group.

But yeah, I sort of climbed the ladder, um, up through Associate Bath and now to VEDA, and then the next step is just one more step to Professor, um, but in the meantime had two kids, and a pandemic, and all sorts of things. So it’s been a bit of a tumultuous time, but, but yeah, the group is pretty established now.

We have, um, PhD students coming through, working on lots of different projects and some, some postdocs working on funded projects as well. And I’ve got lots of great colleagues who can help me with the sort of application of the work we do. People who are specialists in batteries, who can tell me, okay, you know, if you’ve made this material and it has this kind of cycling capacity or something else that I don’t fully understand, then it will be a good battery.

And that’s That’s really, really great to have these people around me who can really push what we do in my niche, the ceramic [00:28:00] processing niche. That’s great. That’s mine, where we overlap for the people. That’s, that’s the joy of being in such a diverse university where people are working on so many different challenges.

Um, and yeah, lots of, Lots of interest. That’s how I got here. Long story. Oh my God. No, this was, this was great. This was, wow. So you’re, you’re from after those, uh, once you started your journey within two weeks or within four weeks, you realize that in your heart, you are a material scientist, a true material scientist.

Yay. Because material science is the best, but you don’t know about it at school, do you? It’s such a A challenge. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. When I started my undergrad in 20, uh, 2008, uh, in India, uh, we didn’t have a material science department. It was called metallurgical and material science engineering.

Yeah. And back then, whenever I would tell people that, yeah, I’m doing my undergrad in metallurgical and material science engineering, they would just ignore the material science part and just focus on metallurgy. And even the metallurgy part, they would be like. Oh, so you’re working with metros. Is it metro cities?

So I was a little bit like, what? Uh, but yeah, it’s, it’s [00:29:00] really nice, uh, to meet you, Claire, who is a material scientist. And you’re, you’re, you’re kind of like, usually people start with, you know, physics or chemistry or biology, and then they transition into material, um, like on paper. Um, but in your case, it’s like material science, material science.

Now at the manufacturing group. That’s a bit awkward. Yeah, that’s true. I probably am a bit rare in that one. It’s, uh, it’s, it’s the different approach, isn’t it? But yeah, you’re right. Most of, an awful lot of people I know who work in materials didn’t do a material science degree. And I think in, In many respects, that’s absolutely fine.

And there’s lots of material science research for everyone. That’s great. The thing I challenge people on is that material science is about microstructure, microstructural evolution, microstructural development. If you’re not thinking about that, you’re not really working on material science. You’re doing other related things and that’s great.

And materials is for everyone, et cetera. Ceramics and metals. Not so much polymers, but ceramics and metals have a grain structure, they have a microstructure, and that is what gives them their properties in the end. It’s not just the chemistry, [00:30:00] it’s all about that microstructural development. And that’s the only thing I’d ask people who come into the field without doing the undergrad, you’ve got to understand.

Microstructure Development and Grain Boundaries and then you’ll be a proper material scientist and I will, I’ll be happy to call you that. I’m so, I’m so, this is like music to my ears, grain boundaries, grains, no one talks about it, oh my god, no one talks about it, oh my god. No one talks about it and it’s, it’s my mission to educate people and get it into my lectures all the time because it’s important.

We will do this together, can’t we? Grains and grain boundaries, let’s make grain boundaries great again. Oh yeah, perfect, we’ll get some hats. Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. So, um, Claire, it sounds to me that Since your bachelor or since your undergrad time until now, uh, uh, also now you have been involved in a lot of interesting research projects.

I mean, even at ETH Zurich and with then working with the armors and like, there’s so, so many interesting experiments, I imagine, uh, and this is a tough question. Okay, I know it, um, for sure. If you have to pick one research project that you’re most [00:31:00] proud of or the most fun or quirky one, could you pick one and explain it to us in simple words in the section we call In Other Words?

I will try. I must say that like you write a description and then something else pops into your head and you realize that something else was also very exciting. And obviously I’m incredibly proud of the work I did in my PhD. And that is such a huge, it’s what I say to my students, you will always be proud of that work.

It’s a huge body of work. Um, but. But finally, I think the project that was both the most frustrating and then ultimately the most incredibly satisfying moment possibly in my life was a project I did for six months. It was one of my first postdocs. I think quite often, I don’t think I’m unusual in this, Eventually you find your proper postdoc, but in that period between handing in the PhD and something else, you sort of, you’ll take anything, you’ll take a quick, quick contract, someone’s end of contract, someone on a short one.

And this was an industrially funded project where we were asked if we could make a tube. which was aluminium oxide at one end and silicon carbide at the other. And that is not an easy thing to [00:32:00] do for anyone who’s not a ceramicist. Ceramicists are putting their head in their hands right now. You can’t do that.

The problem is that aluminium oxide and silicon carbide, the coefficient of thermal expansion is about a ratio of two to one. So you can make this thing and at high temperature, you’ll have a tube and it will be all straight sided and exactly what you want, then you cool it down and your straight sided cube will go like that and likely it will just go because it’s too much.

There’s too much stress in that system mechanically and having a great big hole down the middle is not actually helping anything because that just changes the stress state and makes it even more complicated because now you have two free surfaces. It’s not just one. So it’s a complicated thing to make.

You can’t just literally take a piece of silicon carbide and join it to a piece of aluminum oxide. You have to be more clever than that. So there were two ways we tackled this. One was to change that residual stress. How can we change the residual stress? Well, you can look at the residual stress that’s due to [00:33:00] having alumina oxide and silicon carbide.

You can do a rough calculation that’s like a rule of mixtures. So you say, there’s this contribution to the residual stress from the alumina, and there’s this contribution from the silicon carbide. If we do a sort of 30, et cetera, we’ll gradually change that. And that’s one method that works. It took a while to make that work.

We made it work in a solid piece. And then we started thinking about how do we make this in a tube? So that wasn’t too bad. It took a bit of a while to work out. We needed 19 layers, I think, in the end, which is quite a lot of compositions. And it means running through that processing cycle, processing a ceramic, a unique composition of ceramic takes three days because you’ve got to mill it, you’ve got to dry it, and then you’ve got to, actually process it into the part you want.

So it’s a lot of time. Um, so then we tackled the, how do we make the hole down the middle? We were using a process called hot pressing, which is where you put the powders into a graphite mold and you press them while you heat them up. For silicon carbide, conventional central temperature silicon carbide is over 2000 degrees.

Uh, we couldn’t afford to go to that temperature because the aluminum oxide wouldn’t survive it. It needs more like 1600 max. Uh, so we needed to find a way to. [00:34:00] Compromise and the compromise route was to try adding a different addition into the system. So we added in some different additives, which would bring the temperature down and help with that.

So that was all working fine. The hole down the middle was an issue because the problem is when you put you can construct a die, which makes you a nice little thing and you put a sort of insert in the middle and Hot pressing to some extent relies on the fact that as you cool the sample down, it starts off the same size as the mold, put my fingers properly, and then it shrinks off, and then you can pop it out of the die because there’s a tiny bit of space and you can just slide it away.

When you’ve got something down the middle, it moves away from the outer wall, but it clamps onto the inner wall. So what do you do? Well, I tell you what you do, you keep going back to the hot first and taking out samples that you then can’t get off the central core and you scream in frustration and occasionally go off for a drink because you’re just so annoyed with this whole thing.

But eventually, with some lateral thinking, some real careful thinking about the process, then we found a [00:35:00] supplier who could give us some Inner cause for this mold, which would shrink more and that was critical. So we got an inner section of the graphite mold, which would shrink away from the, the ring and it would take out.

And I will tell you the first time I took this thing out of the hot press was just about the best moment of my life. It was, I had had months and months and months of broken sample and broken ceramic samples are the saddest thing in the world. It’s just like, Oh, I did all that work. All of those days of processing.

Days and days and days of processing. But you’re learning all the time and you’ve got to be persistent with those things. You’ve got to be a bit resilient and keep your eyes on the, on the main goal. What is it that’s causing this problem? You know, it’s the central part. How do we get around that? There’s ways, there’s engineering methods, there’s materials methods.

And so we made this thing. And I remember I gave it to the industrial, uh, supervisor, the, the industrial contact, he was so pleased with it, and he took it to a meeting about it and rolled it down the table at someone. Um, and this thing was robust, it [00:36:00] held together, and we’d done it. And that was just such a satisfying moment.

Um, I don’t think anything will ever top that actually, because it was such a project where I was working Just me and my supervisor, most of the time we were working together, um, there were lots of problems, lots of frustrations, but to have that satisfactory outcome, uh, was so valuable. And there’s a lot of lessons from that project that I take on in, in sort of future work.

So quite a lot of the metamaterials work I do now comes from that grading, from that structuring that we did in that project. Completely different application. This was making a tube for high temperature oil and gas handling. Um, it wasn’t actually anything to do with metamaterials at all, but the processing is very, very similar.

Um, and so, yeah, it still inspires some of the group activities now. That is so cool. Congratulations on making it work. Oh, it was a long time ago, but yes, I still smile when I think about it. Oh my God. This is like, I mean, I know this question is difficult because There are so many projects that you’re proud of, but there is always that one that sticks like, ah, the frustration, frustration, frustration.

And then the, as you, as you described it the first time it works, it’s like the best thing in the world. Nothing can top that. And it’s, Ah, it’s so amazing. Um, wow. It’s so amazing. Yeah. [00:37:00] Cause if the coefficient of expansion is, is different, like two is to one, then it’s like the worst thing and you want, I, yeah.

Okay. Wow. Wow. Wow. Oh my God. That’s so cool. Oh my God. That’s so awesome. So you mentioned that ceramics are Uh, like silicon carbide is at, what, 1, 000 or more degrees? 2, 000. 2, 000 degrees Celsius, and then, um, and, and aluminum oxide is, of course, way lower than that. Uh, it will just melt at that temperature, so.

It probably won’t melt, but you’d end up with an enormous grain size. That’s the problem. So you’d be looking at sort of 2, 500 for it to melt. Um, but, but the grain size, the grain growth is, is, is very, very problematic. And then you’d end up with a very weak alumina component. That’s the problem. Yeah, right.

Because green, green boundaries are where the dislocations can. stop or build up kind of. Well, there are the cracks. Not, well, you know, we’re going to get into very advanced ceramics now. Um, yes, not so many dislocations in ceramics conventionally. They are there, but they don’t always act [00:38:00] to cause failure as they do in metals.

Yeah. Okay. So see, I only know the grain boundaries and dislocations and cracks from the metal perspective. Ceramics I’ve spent so much time on. Ceramics generally have many slip systems to allow the. the movement of dislocation, so it’s, but at high temperatures they do, so that’s when you get some interesting behavior.

But that’s basically why they don’t have any plasticity. Plasticity in metals is dislocation, motion mostly. Um, but yeah, this is why ceramics don’t really have any of that behavior. Right, right, okay. So did you, did you manage to make the silicon carbide at like lower temperatures then? Yeah, we brought it down to, um, below, it was below 1850 in the end, which was fine.

Um, which is, is reasonable and for the application we were using, um, perfectly acceptable. For some applications that wouldn’t be acceptable because you do it by adding in different compounds. Right. Um, it’s a bit of a sort of magic mixture of, of, of compounds. powders that you sprinkle in, a bit like with steel making, you know, you sprinkle all this stuff in.

Um, but it generally does things to the grain boundaries. So you form a different phase at the grain boundaries and [00:39:00] that enables the, the um, densification to happen at a lower temperature. But when you, when you make those kind of compromises, you always compromise on the mechanical properties because you don’t have pure single phase silicon carbide.

You have silicon carbide, which is to some extent glued together with something else. And whenever you have those interfaces between different materials in a composite structure, you have defects and you have potential weaknesses. Yeah, it’s challenging. Okay. Okay. Okay. So is it safe to say that it’s You’re, you’re also changing the recipes of how to make the ceramics, like the good old 10, 000 year old recipe, then you’re basically by different ways that you use your magic science, actually, magic science, you’re, you’re shattering the old recipes and, uh, Recreating new recipes, which are more eco friendly or at low temperatures, like then save energy and all of that.

Is that, is that a fair, uh, Yeah, I’d say [00:40:00] that’s, that’s a, that’s a good description of, of what we’re trying to do really. I mean, obviously some of the recipes are a bit younger than, than 10, 000 years. But we have been making ceramics as humans for a very long time, firing them with fires. And as we’ve been able to go to higher temperatures, that’s when we’ve got these technical ceramics, these high temperature ceramics, which, um, which need heating at such high temperatures.

But yeah, we take, uh, we broadly take five approaches to this in my group. Um, one of them is, is that first one, changing, Adjusting the chemistry, putting in different phases, changing things, um, so you’re still doing basically the same process, but you can bring the temperature down a bit, but not, not dramatically, but, but a bit, which might just enable something else to happen.

Um, we’ve looked at similar things for silicon nitride, for example, can we bring the temperature down just a bit? So we’re more at 1750 than at 1950, 2000, because it does make a big difference. The technology to make a kiln goes really high temperatures is, is much more vulnerable. Um, you’re, you’re taking, if you want to heat something up to such a high temperature, you are putting that.

material, the element that’s doing the heating through some really [00:41:00] high thermal stresses. You’re using a lot of energy to do that. You often have to do it extremely slowly. So any reduction you can get in the temperature can be really good. So that’s sort of the first method we use. We have a couple of sort of Next generation technologies we call them because they are new sort of emerged in the last 20 years that we look at One of them is called flash centering and it’s called that because it happens in a flash And often you get a flash of light when it happens because there’s a huge energy discharge the flash centering we connect electrodes to the ceramic and we put electric field through the ceramic material while we heat it to a more modest temperature than normal.

And what this does is it focuses all the energy into the sample. So instead of heating up huge amounts of space and having to deal with a lot of thermal conductivity issues, we put all the energy straight in. And as you go to the, slightly higher temperature. You can’t do it strictly at boom temperature.

You have to put some energy in. You adjust the ionic conductivity of the material. That enables more densification to happen because you get more diffusion of the solid state materials. So internally, in these fresh sintered samples, the temperature is extremely high. [00:42:00] We’ve melted samples this way, so you know the temperature is incredibly high.

If you can melt a piece of ceramic, you must be above 2000 locally, but we’re only heating the furnace. 700, 900, maybe a thousand, but it’s much, much lower than we’d normally use. Mm-Hmm. . And that’s a, a really compelling way to, to center a ceramic material. Mm-Hmm. . Um, we have found it quite challenging though.

The ionic conductivity has to be high enough so you can’t do it with every material. Um, we are looking at ways that we can use additive approaches to bring those temperatures down. So if we put the right additive on the, on the particle surface, can we bring those temperatures down for materials that don’t really want to flash center in the same kind of way?

So that work we do a lot with a company here in the U. K. called Lucidian who have, um, really nice scalable technologies for doing these flash sintering methods, and we work together closely with them. Um, the second method we use that’s sort of a new technology is called cold sintering, and this was invented by Clive Vandal in Penn State in the last 10 years, I’d say.

It’s really, this is really modern and up to date for ceramics. Um, cold [00:43:00] sintering takes a. a different approach and is very useful for functional applications where you don’t need the full density. But basically in cold sintering, you fuse all the particles together. You don’t really densify in the same way, but you put a small amount of some kind of liquid water, if you can manage a solvent, if not, um, into your ceramic.

powder. You’re not really making a slurry. It’s not like this sort of very dilute. It’s not slip casting. It’s not, it’s not really, really wet. It’s just a small amount of liquid. You put the whole thing under pressure and you take it to a small temperature somewhere between, say, probably between 100 and 300.

It’s that kind of processing window. And you put this thing under pressure. And what happens is a small amount of material on the surface of the particles dissolves into the liquid that is then in a liquid state. And instead of doing solid state diffusion, which needs a lot of energy, you’re in a liquid state, liquid phase diffusion.

Things can move around. Um, also lubricates the particles to rearrange into the best positions. And you end up once you’ve done this with a microstructure that basically looks like almost [00:44:00] like a geological sample. You’ve got your particles all arranged in the best way, and between them is a sort of amorphous gloop of, uh, material that was dissolved and then re precipitated when you, when you reverse the processing conditions.

And for some, for some applications, absolutely not. It will break, it’s ceramic armor, no way, no way are we using those materials. But for something like a battery, Actually, the density is fine. It’s not fully dense, but it’s okay. We can cope with that amorphous material. We can actually use it to do some interesting things.

And we’ve done some very interesting things in my group with putting things into that amorphous mixture to help with the electrochemical properties. Um, and we can do it all at low temperature and that’s the real winner in the end. So we get rid of all these processing compatibility problems with this process.

The challenging part at the moment is it does need pressure. Processes that need pressure are hard to set up, to scale up, to move onwards from, we don’t want to be making individual batteries, you know, one at a time, coin cell. [00:45:00] We want to be making a pouch cell on a line. So that’s the challenge right now is, so how do we take this idea, this, this thing that we know works and make it into a useful industrial process?

Um, the other methods we use in my group aren’t so, Well, they’re a bit different, I suppose. One of them is basically give up and use a polymer. And that, as I said before, has been extremely successful at times. Um, and we’ve made some really interesting materials with polymer approaches. Um, and then the third one is really to try and reduce the number of processing steps involved in making a sample.

This is where I sort of circle back to the grading. So instead of making lots of individual pieces and having to then fuse them together. We do it all in one processing step and we put that all together. So it’s sort of a combination of all the other technologies and that’s how we put it together. So it’s sort of five categories of quite broad, broad categories of approaches.

But all the work kind of fits under those, under those areas. And that’s how we tackle these problems. Okay. Wow. Thank you for sharing your recipe or your tricks with us. You didn’t get all of them. [00:46:00] Thank you for giving us a glimpse into the recipe. That is, that is so, so cool. So Claire, it’s clear to me. Uh, Oh, Claire, it’s clear.

That, that you really love the research aspect of being a scientist or being a reader now. What else do you like about being a scientist other than the research itself? What else? Yeah, this is an interesting one because there’s lots of things actually. I, I, it’s amazingly beautiful. It’s an amazing privilege to get to do this job, um, to get to learn things, to get to explore my own interests, to build something that is really focused around me and what I’m interested in.

But I think the thing that, the thing that’s most compelling to me about being a scientist, being a, especially being a material scientist, and the thing I notice in myself compared to other people, you understand why things are the way they are. You know, and I think there’s a huge power in that in your everyday life in the world.

If you understand why is something made out of a particular thing, why does that have that particular appearance or that [00:47:00] particular property, or even why did that break? You know, these are really interesting things to understand, and I think that’s the real, The really best thing for me about being a material scientist is understanding the world, really understanding why things are the way they are, um, being able to explain it to my kids when it’s, why is it like this?

Why is it like this? Um, that’s what I really, really love, um, about my job and about what I’ve chosen to do. So understanding really the why, that is, that is That is really cool. Yes, definitely. Um, it, it also sounds to me, Claire, that your research experience has been wonderful so far. Um, I mean, of course, on the surface from what I know.

Um, however, if you had three wishes to improve your research experience, what would you ask? for. And we recently did a analysis, like a word cloud of, uh, we, we, we reached a milestone of a hundred material scientists. And we ask all of them, like, what are your three wishes? Talk three wishes. And after you tell me your wishes, I can tell you [00:48:00] what the popular ones were.

I’m just imagining a big word cloud with the central thing being more money. Yes, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. More money, more money would be great. More funding would be amazing. Um, in the UK, more funding that isn’t tied to applications. The things I do are not application specific. And that is not actually appreciated that well right now.

Um, so I sort of write a grant that’s for solid state batteries, for mess materials, for whatever. The underlying technology is much broader than that. And that should be rewarded. I think we should be rewarding people who work on things that are universally applicable. Um, more time would be amazing. More time to do everything.

There’s a sort of trend as you go more senior to do less teaching and to take on fewer students and to take on more admin roles. But I like doing all of my job and I don’t want to give up any of it. But the time is so, So precious and it’s so difficult. Um, yeah, that’s a real [00:49:00] challenge. Um, and then the other one I would say is this is a little bit of a jokey one But it’s I really wish people would stop telling me interesting things Because every time someone tells you something interesting I want to do a new project on it I am that little I am that little magpie who’s going after the shiny shiny new thing And it would be really nice if people could just give up asking me to do new stuff But i’m absolutely joking about that because I love new things You And really the challenge is just finding the time to close off the old stuff.

The pandemic’s been so hard. It’s been really tough for my students. It’s been really tough for me as well. Um, there is a huge amount of stuff that we need to publish and we need to get out there, but finding the time when there’s so many other things coming up, it’s really, really hard. So yeah, it’s sort of that combination of things is what I really need.

More money, more time. And I think the second and the third or other, all three wishes of yours are kind of connected. And yeah, I think that’s probably right. Just there’s more, more time and more bandwidth to do things that are really interesting. Yeah, definitely bursting with ideas. Maybe it’s just the nature of this opportunity though.

Like I think I [00:50:00] said to you, mid career is a really great place to be a mid career right now. And it’s. You’re not senior enough to get asked to do the really like scary important admin business stuff of the university But you’ve got past that like, how do I get my first grant? How do I get my first student thing?

So you’re in this really happy place where you can do anything, but you can’t do everything And I want to do everything You can do anything, but you can’t do everything That should be a t shirt, I feel. Well, that’s the second business idea we’ve had. Exactly. Speaking of bursting with creative ideas, um, that’s awesome.

That’s really cool. I really hope all three businesses of yours do materialize in one way or the other. Material science materialize. Ha ha ha. Not making puns on this very, very, um, serious science podcast at all. It never happens. Um, this has been wonderful getting to know you. So, and I can’t wait for our followers to know more about your research, more about you, more about Warwick, more about the connection between Warwick and Tata and everything, everything.

So what can the followers [00:51:00] expect in the week that you’re taking over the Real Scientist Nano Twitter account? It’s going to be a very exciting week. I actually specifically asked for this week because that I’ve ended up with, um, because it happens to be a week where I think I’m doing every part of my job and that’s not normal for like a given week, you know, it’s a particularly intense week, but I will be talking about background and where I sort of came from, um, talking about our research, especially, Uh going through sort of how you conventionally process the ceramic and how we do it with these new technologies And talking about some of the applications.

So so batteries and metamaterials But alongside that you’re all going to come along for a ride with me as I do teaching I have the ceramics lecture to teach on the first day I it’s the last week of term. So i’m tutees um, they all come along and and have a chat to me about how the term’s gone and we um Uh, exchange Christmas wishes, of course, because it’s the last week of term, uh, project students who are, who are, will be then halfway through their project.

So hopefully we might even have some results to, to have a quick, uh, sneak preview of, um, and then towards the end of the [00:52:00] week, I, um, I’m involved in a UK. initiative called the UK Metamaterials Network and the co investigator is like the deputy person. Um, and on the Friday we are running an outreach showcase.

So I will take everyone around the exhibits and we will have a look at some real life metamaterials. I know people had a preview of that with the, the last, uh, last week. the last person but um, we’ll have some more and uh, and you’ll get to visit the advisory board meeting. That might be a little bit confidential but um, we will go along to the advisory board meeting together where our advisory board who are amazing and give us some great advice will be helping us with what do we do with our network.

We’ve got a community of over 600 people in the UK which we’ve built up in the last 18 months. And a lot of really dedicated people who really believe in metamaterials and what we can do with them. So, uh, we’ve got to capitalize on that and build something for the future. So yeah, you’re going to come on a ride with me, um, around all those bits of my job.

And hopefully it won’t be too hectic. Then I’m having the weekend off. I will be posting pictures from the park. That sounds amazing. Oh my God. Definitely action packed vegan. Wow, that’s a very, very, very, um, full week and can, yeah. It is not always like this. I will emphasize it’s normally a little bit less, uh, less hectic

Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm. . Okay. Okay. Well we can’t wait [00:53:00] to, uh, join you for your week, uh, of lots of things that you’re doing. Thank you very much, Claire, for speaking with me. This has been wonderful and can’t wait to have you on Real Scientist now account. Thank you so much. for

listening. To know more about us, do visit our website, theirsciencedoc. com and do consider giving us a review or a rating or follow, depending on wherever you’re consuming this content. Thank you very much.

Podcast title – Shattering 10,000 year old ceramic recipe