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Give your plants and flowers a decorative home to live in, with these attractive ceramic planters.
Sorry, we don't have any Ceramic Planter and Decorative Planters to feature at the moment. Please check back another time. Meanwile here's some interesting information.
Put a ceramic planter down in your garden or yard and it'll probably stay in place. It's unlikely to be knocked around by passibg cats or other small creatues which may brush by it. Unike cheap plastic pots which can easily be knocked over and can look quite horrible sometimes, a ceramic pot will be sturdy and will stay attractive in any weather. Ceramic planters have the advantage that when aged, they can look just as good as when new, becoming vintage items with any attractive wearing that may occur.
Ceramics have been around for many thousands of years, yet some of the most impressively modern and innovative materials are made from ceramics.
In general when talking about ceramics, we usually are referring to objects made from clay or similar materials created by the process of pottery.
The word Ceramic actually originates from the greek word keramos which means pottery or a potter.
When it comes to a scientific definition, ceramics are inorganic, non metallic materials which are usually created by being fired in a high temperature kiln or oven or similar source of heat, and then subsequently cooled. They usually have a crystalline structure, meaning that they have a regular 3-dimensional molecular structure, or are part-crystalline, but they may also be amorphous (materials whose atoms are oriented in a random pattern).
The use of ceramics goes way back to prehistoric times. Throughout the world, evidence has been discovered of ceramics being used as far back as Neolithic times (around 10,000 BC) and there are even signs that ceramics were used for religious or ceremonial purposes even earlier. The oldest known example of ceramics being used in history is a 4.4 inch high statuette , known as the Venus of Dolní V?stonice which was discovered at a Paleolithic site at the Moravian basin south of Brno in what is now the modern-day Czech republic. This figurine of an unclothed female has amazingly been dated as being from somewhere between 25,000 and 29,000 BC.
One of the big advantages of ceramic items are that they are extremely resistant to heat. Ceramic shielding is actually used for spacecraft to help shield them from intense heat. Whilst they in space, a spacecraft is unprotected by the earth's atmosphere, so solar radiation hits the the craft at extreme intensity.
NASA's Space Shuttle is covered in thousands of special tiles which have a ceramic coating. When you look at the space shuttle you'll see that certain parts of the craft are colored black whilst others are colored white. Have you ever wondered why the difference exists? I often had, and whilst reseaching this page I've discovered there's an interesting reason. The white colored tiles, which are located mainly on the Space shuttle's upper surface, reflect the heat of the sum whilst the craft is in space. This solar heat can hit between 370 and 650 degrees Celsius (700 to 1,200 degrees fahrenheit). The black colored tiles help the shuttle dissipate heat during re-entry into the earth's atmosphere. The temperature of re-entry can be between 650 to a whopping 1260 degrees celsius (1,200 and 2,300 degrees fahrenheit). Amazingly these tiles can lose their heat so quickly that you could pick up a tile with your bare hands only a few seconds after removing it from an oven (don't try this with anything at home, folks).
Ceramic can also be spun into very fine fibre strands by super-heating chemical compounds like silica to a molten state. This is then spun into hair-like strands which can be cut and mixed with other chamicals to create new compounds or woven into fibres. Such fibres are used to fill in the gaps between the Space shuttle's tiles and are also woven to make items like heat shields and insulation blankets.
Another amazing ceramic product made by Nextel called Flame Stopping Dot Paper is as thin as paper yet does not shrink, melt or catch flame when exposed to fire. This flexible and lightweight invention uses high-tensile stength oval-shaped ceramic fibres, which make it able to resist fire penetration for more than 4 minutes at a temperature of 2,000 degrees fahreheit (1093 degrees celsius). This combination of light weight and extremely good flame retardation properties make it ideal for use to line and protect compartments aboard aircraft.
Back up in space, after more than 50 years of launching rockets and vehicles into space, there's quite a bit of debris floating around up there. Much of the debris is small like tiny flecks of paint but there are around one hundred thousand bits of debris which are a centimter or bigger in size. This debris travels at an average speed of 10 kilometers a second. At that speed the kinetic energy of a medium sized piece of debris could do serious damage to a space shuttle or other spacegoing craft. Bearing this in mind, NASA engineers discovered that combining ceramic fibres with kevlar (which is used in bulletproof clothing), a fabric can be created which is even more resistant to impacts than aluminium plating. This is woven into a sheet which is called a Stuffed Whipple Shield. Strong and lightweight, it is used on orbiting spacecraft and also on the International Space station to protect them from space debris and meteoroids.
As you can see, ceramics are not only beautiful but can create quite amazing modern inventions too!
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