Application of statistical design of experiments for the optimization of floor tile glaze formulation

Abstract

This paper investigates the influence of the various parameters on the quality of industrial Iranian floor tile glaze by using the experimental designs anal-ysis, Taguchi Method. A commercial grade of engobe and green body from one of the national tile companies have been used. Three factors namely: particle size of glaze slurry, sintering time and temperature were selected to identify the influence of these factors on the quality of glaze. A Taguchi L8 Orthogonal Arrays, fractional factorial design, was used to optimize experimental trials. This approach successfully categorized the effect of each variable using only 8 experimental trials and identified the most important variables affecting this glaze making process with the analysis of variance (ANOVA). The quality control tests of floor tile such as thermal shock resis-tance, specking resistance and surface hardness were carried out according to the existing Iranian standard. The optimized samples were obtained by factorial design analysis; taking into account coarser particle size, higher temperature and less time. The optimized sample was counter checked using Taguchi method and by selecting effective factors in high levels. It was demonstrated that, the particle size of the slurry is the only significant parameter and sample with high level in particle size and temperature of sintering is the best sample according to existing standard of floor tile