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TILE PRESSING CLAYS

The Premiere™ range of plastic clays (ball clays) are carefully selected, engineered mineral products designed to give optimum performance in tile pressing applications.

Sibelco Ukrainian Premiere tile pressing clays have been engineered using mineralogically unique feed clays which are blended to have excellent plasticity and strength. They possess an exceptionally unique illitic mineralogy which combines very high dry strength, plasticity and high vitrification together with stable shrinkage at low firing temperatures.

These low carbon clays are ideal components to control thermal expansion, dimensional accuracy and fired colour in high quality tile applications

Key Features of the Ukraine Premiere range include:

• exceptionally high strength & plasticity• low colouring oxides• low carbon• high fusibility with controlled vitrification & shrinkage

They are ideally suited as the sole clay in a formulation or can be used to improve the performance of local clays.

Recommended Applications

The Ukraine Premiere range is especially suited for making large format, super thin tiles due to their exceptional plasticity which supports improved mechanical resistance and high dimensional accuracy.

Premiere products can benefit customer production processes by improving pressing and firing characteristics of porcelain tile due to:

• low colouring oxides = white firing colour• unique mineralogy = high plastic unfired strength & production yield• high alkali content = low fired porosity & improved frost resistance• consistency in quality variations = high first grade tile production & minimized size variation for end customer products Chemical and Analytical Data – typical values which do not represent a specification

Optimum performance for modern tile manufacturing

Recommended Tile Applications Product Wall Floor Glazed

PorcellantoUnglazed

PorcellantoDBY – 4 DBK – 0 DBK – 1 DBK – 2E

Unit DBY – 4 DBK – 0 DBK – 1 DBK – 2E SiO2 Mass % 60.0 61.0 62.0 66.0 Al2O3 26.0 25.0 24.0 21.0 Fe2O3 1.0 1.1 1.2 0.9 TiO2 1.6 1.6 1.7 1.7 K2O 2.6 2.4 2.3 2.5 Loss on Ignition % 7.2 7.1 6.8 6.0 Modulus Of Rupture (Dried 110oc) MPa 9.0 8.5 8.5 8.0 Residue > 125 μm % 4.5 4.8 4.8 5.0 Particle Size @ 2 μm % finer 75 75 75 75

The Ukraine Premiere range of products offers significant advantages over locally available tile pressing clays.Their unique mineralogy and pressing characteristics can improve plasticity and breakage resistance:

Figure 1: Plot of modulus of rupture against strain to illustrate the difference in overall unfired strength improvement in a standard vitreous porcelain body against local plastic clays

Figure 2: Calculated body “toughness”

Premiere products have high vitrification yet stable linear shrinkage, optimising firing cycle times and providing greater dimensional accuracy.

Figure 3: Vitrification properties: water absorption & linear shrinkage

When fired to the same temperature, there is no significant change in visual properties (L*a*b*) between the trial body formulations. However, if we compare the whiteness at similar water absorption, by plotting % water absorption against L, then significant improvements in whiteness can be seen by using Premiere products, especially at low water absorption values.

Figure 4: Plot of L* against % water absorption

Trial data is based on comparisons of Premiere DBK-0 to local clay used in a large format pressed vitreous stoneware tile formulation. Utilising feldspar @ 55%, Kaolin

@ 5%, Silica @ 8%, Talc @ 2% and local plastic clay @ 30%.

Toughness / kg cm-2

Body Standard 0.000651 Body 3% Premiere 0.001191 Body 5% Premiere 0.001149 Body 10% Premiere 0.001254

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0 0.002 0.004 0.006 0.008 0.01 0.012 0.014 0.016

BodyStandard

Body3% Premiere

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Body5% Premiere

Body10% Premiere

Strain (%)

Wat

er a

bsor

ptio

n %

Temperature oC

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Temperature oC

Whi

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Water absorption %

www.sibelcoceramics.com

Sibelco UkraineIllinsky Business Centre,1st block, 4th floor,vul. Illins’ka, 8Kyiv, Ukraine 04070

Sales: +38 044 490 33 18Fax: +38 044 490 33 17Email: sibelco@clays.com.ua

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