Sourcing Li2O from spodumene instead of lithium carbonate comes at a cost

Monday 21st January 2019

insight-live.com/material/975">Lithium carbonate is now ultra-expensive. Yet the reactive glaze on the left needs it. Spodumene has a high enough Li2O concentration to be a possible source here. It also has a complex chemistry, but the other oxides it contains are those common to glazes anyway. Using my account at insight-live.com, I did the calculations and got a pretty good match in the formulas (lower section in the green boxes). Then I made 10-gram balls and did a GLFL test at 2200F (notice the long crystals in the glass pools below the runways). Not surprisingly, this recipe is very runny, that's why the tiny yellow crystals grow during cooling. The new version fires very similar, perhaps better. Our calculated cost to mix this recipe in 2022 was $17.84/kg vs. $10.40/kg. But there is a practical cost: Poor slurry properties. The spodumene sources so much Al2O3 that 70% Alberta Slip had to be dropped to accommodate it! How does one use this type of glaze without ruining kiln shelves? Using a catcher glaze is one answer.

Pages that reference this post in the Digitalfire Reference Library:

Lithium Carbonate, Spodumene, Sometimes it is better to replace the base in a production glaze recipe, Here is why Petalite and Spodumene will seldom substitute for Lithium Carbonate

This post is one of thousands found in the Digitalfire Reference Database. Most are part of a timeline maintained by Tony Hansen. You can search that timeline on the home page of digitalfire.com.