Topic summary
Ceramic materials
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Ceramic.
Mechanical properties
Ceramic materials are usually ionic or covalent bonded materials. A material held together by either type of bond will tend to fracture before any plastic deformation takes place, which results in poor toughness and brittle behavior in these materials. Additionally, because these materials tend to be porous, pores and other microscopic imperfections act as stress concentrators, decreasing the toughness further, and reducing the tensile strength. These combine to give catastrophic failures, as opposed to the more ductile failure modes of metals.