Influence of composition on some industrially relevant properties of traditional sanitary-ware glaze

Two series of glazes have been produced from different combinations of the same raw materials in the range of interest for sanitary-ware applications: they are designed to allow one to get insight into network-forming and network-modifying species. Fusibility tests and hot stage microscope observations show the influence of even low differences in the starting chemical compositions on the transformation temperatures. X-ray powder diffraction, wavelength dispersion spectrometry and scanning electron microscopy prove that: (i) zircon, the most abundant crystalline phase, is homogeneously distributed and decreases by a 3% from its starting value; (ii) the glass-phase of glaze has a quasi-uniform composition. X-ray synchrotron radiation micro-tomography shows that glaze porosity is 15% by volume, and voids are prevalently not interconnected and with size up to 50 μm. The linear thermal expansion of the glass phase of glaze ranges between 6 and 7 × 10−6 °C−1, without apparent correlation with composition.