Cooking Pot Wall Thickness and Thermal Shock: A Lower Bound on Survival Over an Open Flame and an Upper Bound Set by Heating Time

This paper addresses clay cooking pots that crack over an open flame, and heavy pots that survive but take so long to heat that households stop using them. It presents a wall-thickness window for flame-used cooking pots, bounded below by thermal stress and above by heating time, derived entirely from stated assumptions and a computation whose code and full output accompany the paper. The sweep covers pot wall thickness from 3 to 10 mm. The headline outcome is: window low mm 4; window high mm 6; thermal fos at 10mm 0.89; mechanical fos at 3mm 1.01; heating at window high min 24.6. These figures identify a specific operating point or bound that a workshop can apply directly, and they also show how quickly performance deteriorates away from it. No kiln was built, no ware was fired, and nothing was measured for this study. SIMULATED, NOT MEASURED.