The Deflocculation Study On Architectural Ceramic Raw Material And Ceramic Body

In the manufacturing process of building ceramics, appropriate water reducing agents are needed to endow ceramic slurry with good manipulation performance. High solid content and good fluidity not only helps enhance powder output for spray drying process, thus reducing the energy consumption, but also improves the quality and productivity for ceramic products, thus saving production cost. Currently, inorganic water reducing agents are intensively employed throughout our country, but its effectiveness on improving the stability for ceramic slurry is not really satisfactory. Polymer water reducing agent helps improve the dispersing properties for ceramic slurry, but its price-cost is relatively high. Therefore, the research and development for cheap water reducing agent with good deflocculation performance has a great significance on ceramic industry.In our research paper, aiming at four typical kinds of ceramic mineral materials, A#and B# ceramic blanks, respectively, our efforts are firstly made to analyze their chemical and mineral compositions characterized by X-ray fluorescence?XRF? and X-ray diffraction?XRD? techniques. On the above basis, we firstly conducted dispergation experiments on the raw materials and blanks, then added commercial reducing agents such as sodium metasilicate nonahydrate, sodium tripolyphosphate, sodium silicate,sodium humate, home-made F-7, and finally mixed them. The dispergation of each water reducing agents and their complex has been researched in terms of their water contents,fluidity,density,thixotropic, and zeta potential. Combined with the chemical and mineral compositions, we preliminarily study the dispersion mechanism of water reducing agent.Conclusions are detailed as follows:The dispergation for the viscosity materials with higher Al₂O₃ content or higher Ca O?Mg O content requires more polymer water reducing agents and composite water reducing agents; The slurry suspension performance for the raw material with higher Si O₂ content,mainly depends on the particle size. In general, the smaller sized particle achieves a better suspension stability; General inorganic water reducing agent can meet the technological requirements for the dispergation for the raw material with higher Si O₂ content and certain clay minerals.Sodium silicate has good effects on the operating performance for unknown formula A# slurry.When the water content is 31.03%, the velocity and thixotropy of slurry is77.27 s and 1.04, respectively. It can be explained by considering that after adding sodium silicate, its silicate anions can react with the Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺ in slurry and generateinsoluble remainder, promoting the exchange of Na+, thus reducing slurry viscosity and increasing the liquidity.There is little correlation between B# ceramic body and its basic materials including Ehu sand, Jinxina sand and Ji'an white mud. For Ehu sand, home-made F-7 has the optimal water reducing effect. when the addition contents of F-7 is 0.35% and the water contents is 33%, the velocity for slurry is 70 s. For Jinxina sand, each water reducing agent has good deflocculation performance. Among them, sodium tripolyphosphate is the best one and with water contents of 33%, the velocity for slurry is 26 s when the addition contents of sodium tripolyphosphate is 0.01%. For Ji'an white mud, home-made F-7 is the best one. The complex of 0.5% sodium silicate and 0.25% F-7 can decrease the water contents down to 35%, where velocity and thixotropic for slurry are 34.47 s and 1.02,respectively.