Characterisation of Bricks Fabricated Using fly-ash with Different Additive Materials Namely Granite-powder,Alite-
cement and Black-sand in Different Compositions for High temperature furnace lining

Abstract

Industries associated with high temperature applications such as steel making and iron making industries make use of refractory bricks to carry out their entire manufacturing process. Different steps involved in manufacturing steel involves different types of refractory bricks based on various factors like working temperature, thermal stability, strength, wear resistance, chemical resistance. These bricks are to be replaced after certain duration of time for efficient functioning of the manufacturing units.The production of these refractory bricks involves so many complicated methods which are likewise expensive. As the need of such bricks is humongous for large scale industries, instead of manufacturing these bricks they import the bricks from other countries. Fly-ash, which covers major proportion of world’s industrial waste is known to have very high silica and alumina content. These compounds are known to be some of the important mineral compounds for the manufacturing of refractory bricks which has led to the ideology of using fly-ash for manufacturing of bricks incorporated with additive materials namely granite-powder, alite-cement and black-sand. The current work is focussed on fabricating bricks using fly-ash and different additive materials to study their various chemical, thermal and mechanical properties for high temperature applications.Bricks were fabricated using fly-ash with the additive materials namely, granite-powder, alite-cement and black sand in different compositions to study the variation in various property changes in the samples. Different analysis namely,phase analysis, surface morphology, micro-hardness, apparent porosity, bulk density, high temperature microscopy, wear test.The studies revealed smoother surface for the pellets with high percentage of granite-powder. The bonding of the particles was the result of pozzolanic activity of silicates of calcium present in cement and aluminium silicates present in fly-ash. The phases such as silicates of aluminium, calcium and sodium, quartz, zirconium oxide, were most commonly observed in the samples. In addition to these, formation of phases like quartz, zircon and silicates of magnesium and aluminium was observed in samples with alite-cement additives. Zirconium oxide with silicates of calcium were majorly formed. The samples with black-sand additives have shown phases such as quartz, zirconium oxide, titanium oxide in the XRD analysis.As comparison with other types of furnace brick, fly ash brick gives a new era for dramatically reduction of the cost.