# One bucket of casting slip is followed to the point it sets

> A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities traces the slow thickening of a reclaimed porcelain slip to calcium returned by its own plaster moulds.

A bucket of porcelain slip that pours like cream in the first week of term and
stands a paddle upright by the last is a familiar loss in a casting studio, and
is usually put down to age. _Thirty Castings to a Gel: Calcium carry-over and
the loss of electrostatic stability in one reclaimed porcelain casting slip_, a
research poster by Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon
Register, with Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, and Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior
Research Fellow, puts it down to the moulds.

> My own field is how things are brought to an end, and it is mostly paperwork.
> It was instructive to watch an ending that kept its own minutes, and kept
> them in millivolts.
>
> --- Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register

The poster aligns an electrical account of the slip with a mechanical one
across thirty casting cycles, and sets both beside a portion of the same slip
cast only in sealed moulds. The charge that holds the particles apart fell from
46.2 to 19.1 millivolts in the working bucket and by about two in the sealed
one, and the slip began to resist the paddle at a threshold the authors could
name in advance.

The University holds that a material which has stopped cooperating is owed an
explanation as much as a replacement, and is content that this one has
received both. Dr Emenike said the remedy "turned out to be a matter of taking
something away, which is not the instinct of anyone standing beside a bucket".

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.06jguq.