ABSTRACT
The State of Rio Grande do Norte, more specifically in the municipality of Parelhas, Brazil, the ceramic industry is already well established, growing year after year. However, the industry stimulus has led to accelerated exhaustion of the local clay deposits used by the industry and, therefore, threatening the maintenance of the ceramics industry in the municipality and the Seridó region. For this reason, interest has been deepened in the search for new clay deposits in order to meet their current and future demands. Recently, new deposits have been discovered in the municipality, however, these clays have not been properly characterized, causing damage to both the final quality of the product and its full industrial use.Thus, this work aims to characterize physically, chemically and mineralogically clays extracted from deposits in the Parelhas/RN municipality, with the purpose of classifying them aiming to be applied in the ceramic industry of the region. The samples were beneficiated by drying at 60 °C, followed by milling and sieving in 200 mesh sieves. Then, they were characterized by x-ray fluorescence, x-ray diffraction, thermogravimetric and differential analysis, particle size analysis, ignition loss and plasticity. The constituents of the samples identified by X-ray fluorescence were SiO2, Al2O3, Fe2O3, MgO, K2O, CaO and TiO2. The X-ray diffractograms revealed the predominant presence of the clay minerals smectite, feldspar, kaolinite and quartz in the samples. The total mass loss for the samples ranged from 14% to 22.65%. The particle distribution ranged from 0.2 to 40 μm, with an average diameter between 3 and 7 μm. The samples are classified as highly plastic and are feasible for use in the red ceramic industry.
Keywords
Clays; Characterization techniques; Parelhas/RN; Ceramic industry
