The effects of chemical composition and firing temperature in heavy clay brick production - Chemometric approach

Abstract

Factors influencing final clay brick properties are numerous, since the raw materials are highly heterogeneous. The chemometric approach is rarely used in analysis in this field, although it could significantly improve understanding of the overall system behavior and the quality of products. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used on a group of 139 samples collected in Serbia to discriminate groups of samples according to similarity of chemical composition and fired laboratory products properties. The focus of this study was to determine the importance of parameters that describe clay brick production and quality, depending on final usage of raw material in the clay brick industry. A fuzzy synthetic evaluation, using a membership trapezoidal function with defined optimal interval values for different types of heavy clay products, is chosen for the study. The optimal sample's chemical composition and firing temperature were chosen by the fuzzy synthetic evaluation, regarding the kind of the heavy clay product.