Diatomaceous Earth Pottery Preparation And Properties Of TiO₂Composite

In recent years, more and more attention has been paid on diatomite interiordecoration which has the characteristic of no burning, light mass, air purification,sound nsulation and adiabatic, as well as humidity regulation and other environmentalattributes. Bcause of it’s large surface area and good absorption properties diatomiteproducts as a carrier of TiO2photocatalysts have obvious advantages, good scientificvalue and broad application prospects.The excellent performance of diatomite products is due to its unique porousstructure. If the sintering temperature can be lowered, and the products would meetthe requirements of strength in practical application, the cost of industrial productioncould be reduced.In this paper, ceramic body was prepared by semi-pressure molding method, thenit was sintered at lower temperature. In order to characterize it’s performancecompressive strength, porosity, sintering shrinkage, adsorption of the diatomite-basedpottery were tested. The results show that the composition of raw materials, formingpressure, sintering temperature and sintering time had an impact on the potteryperformance. The results show that: Diatomaceous earth pottery obtained bettercomprehensive performance when it’s sintered at the temperature of800℃for3h.Due to lower sintering temperature, cheap raw materials and good performance tomeet the environmental expectations, diatomite products have a very good marketprospects.On the basis of the experiments above, the recipe was added with kaolin and coalgangue and the performance of the sample was characterized. The results showed that:with the addition of kaolin less than30wt.%or addition of the gangue less than10wt.%, the samples got lower sintering shrinkage, decreased porosity and asignificantly increase in compressive strength. The adsorption test of the samples onmethylene blue shows that, adsorption properties of diatomaceous earth pottery wassignificantly enhanced with the addition of kaolin which may be a better choice thanthe gangue.TiO₂was loaded on the diatomaceous earth pottery products by homogeneous precipitation method using urea as a precipitating agent, the samples werecharacterized by means of XRD and photocatalytic tests. The results showed that:within the level of the selected factors, it’s the water bath temperature and time ofcalcination temperature that significantly affect the sample’s photocatalyticperformance. Our experimental results indicate that the reaction condition for theloading of TiO₂by homogeneous precipitation method is optimized when the waterbath temperature, water bath time and the calcination temperature were set at70℃,120min and400℃, respectively. Relatively cheap raw materials, better samplepreparation, simple preparation process make homogeneous precipitation methodsuitable for mass production and pomising in application.