Inorganic nonmetallic materials defined

But not all ceramic materials are clay (glass is made of sand], and they don t all behave the same way. They are, it turns out, far more interesting and versatile than one might imagine. For years, ceramics were generally defined as inorganic, nonmetallic materials, are known primarily as silicate bearing, that is, composed of the natural minerals that make up most of the rocks in the earth s crust. 

Despite many recent advances in material science and engineering, the performance of ceramic components in severe conditions is still far below the ideal limits predicted by theory. Modem ceramics have been primarily the products of applied physics and parallel the developments of physical metallurgy. The emphasis on the relation between behavior and microstructure has been fruitful for ceramic scientists for several decades. It has been recently realized, however, that major advances in ceramics during the next several decades will require an emphasis on molecular-level control. Organic chemistry, once abhorred by ceramic engineers trained to define ceramics as inorganic-nonmetallic materials, has become a valuable source of new ceramics. It has recently become known that as the stmctural scale in ceramics is reduced from macro to micro and to nano crystalline regimes, the basic properties are drastically altered. A brittle ceramic material has been shown to be partially ductile, for example. 

Glass is an inorganic nonmetallic material. Generally, the glass state is defined as the frozen state of a supercooled and thus a solidified liquid. It results from the suppression of the crystallization of a melt. 

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