Ohio doesn’t get many sandstorms. But an hour east of Cincinnati, on an otherwise sunny day, a dust devil is brewing. Atop a towering scaffold, a row of hoses pumps out dense clouds of powder and grit. They are instantly sucked, like a horizontal tornado, into the spinning fan blades of a jet engine a few feet away.
After examining the possibility of ceramics being used in flight in 2001, scientists from the Institute for Defense Analyses starkly concluded, “There may be more pigs flying than ceramics in the future.” It’s easy to see why when you think of a coffee mug: The material is great for handling heat but breaks catastrophically when met with force.