One tradition of The American Ceramic Society’s annual meetings and the coinciding MS&T conferences is the student mug drop competition.
The purpose of the Ceramic Mug Drop contest is to promote spirited and collegial competition among students by demonstrating their prowess in manufacturing a ceramic mug possessing high strength, mechanical reliability, and aesthetics. Mugs are fabricated by student teams from ceramic raw materials and are judged on both aesthetics and breaking thresholds. The mugs are then dropped from successively higher levels until the breaking threshold is reached. The mug with this highest successful drop distance wins.
Certain rules apply, but in general, the mugs must be made entirely from ceramic or glass materials, and may not contain any metal, plastic, paint, organics, or non-ceramic materials. Each must have a serviceable handle, be able to hold at least 500 ml of liquid but not more than 625 ml, be usable for drinking purposes and must be fired or formed at a temperature of 300°C or higher.
Some of the mugs are quite beautiful (see below) and another award is given for the “Best Looking” mug.
… Adding that the contest is sponsored by Keramos, the national ceramic engineering fraternity, and that the winning team was from the University of Washington.
