Kiln facts for kids
A kiln is like a super-hot oven! It's a special, insulated box that gets hot enough to change things. It can make objects hard, dry them, or cause chemical changes.
People have used kilns for thousands of years to bake objects made from clay into pottery, tiles, and bricks. Big factories use special kilns called rotary kilns. These kilns spin around and use heat to change materials like rocks and minerals. For example, they turn limestone into lime for making cement.
What Kilns Are Used For
Before kilns, people made pottery by firing it in pits in the ground. The oldest known kiln was found in Iraq and is about 8,000 years old (around 6000 BC). These early kilns could get hotter than 900°C (1652°F)! That's super hot!
Kilns are used for many different things, including:
- Heating glass to shape it, join pieces, or add colors.
- Making metal stronger or easier to work with.
- Baking ceramics, like plates and mugs.
- Making bricks for buildings.
- Melting metal so it can be poured into molds.
- Smelting (heating) ore to get metal out of it.
- Heating chemicals to break them down.
- Heating limestone and clay to make Portland cement.
- Heating limestone to make quicklime.
- Heating gypsum to make plaster of Paris.
- For cremation, which uses very high temperatures.
- Drying tobacco leaves.
- Drying malted barley for making beer and other fermented drinks.
- Drying hops for brewing (these are called hop kilns or oast houses).
- Drying corn (grain) before it's ground or stored.
- Drying fresh wood so it can be used right away.
- Drying wood to be used as firewood.
- Heating wood to turn it into charcoal.
Images for kids
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A Charcoal kiln in California.
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A Hops kiln.
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A Catenary arch kiln being built.
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An empty, intermittent kiln. This specific example is a "car kiln"; the base is on wheels and has been rolled out of the kiln—this makes loading and unloading easier.
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Recreating a traditional Cambodian kiln at Khmer Ceramics & Fine Arts Centre in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
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Brickmaking kilns in the Mekong Delta. The boat in front carries rice chaff used as fuel.
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A wood-fired pottery kiln in Hội An, Vietnam.
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A two-story porcelain kiln with furnaces á alandier in Sèvres, France, around 1880.
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A computer drawing of a tunnel kiln.
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A kiln yard with many kilns.
See also
In Spanish: Kiln para niños
