A MATHEMATICAL-MODEL FOR THE CALCULATION OF CERAMIC BATCH FORMULAS

In the ceramic field the process of forming a ceramic body consists of several steps that must be executed efficiently and controlled closely to achieve the desired product. A major step in the process is the selection of raw materials, which not only will provide the necessary oxides, but also will melt and fine well to form a high-quality product. This process, if carried out on a trial-and-error manner, may lead to an uneconomical production cost due to wrong materials being selected. In addition, some important physical batch characteristics may be ignored owing to the increase in computational requirements if more constraints are added to the process. In this paper we propose the mathematical modelling approach, which has gained very little attention from researchers in this field, as an alternative to the trial-and-error approach. The model presented in this paper may be used to calculate the batch formula of a designed product without first knowing its empirical formula. An illustrated example of the use of this model is also provided. © 1990.