Lab testing a clay for its physical properties

Thursday 26th February 2015

It only takes a few minutes to make these. But you would be amazed at how much information they can give you about a clay! These are SHAB test bars, an LDW test for water content and a DFAC test disk about to be put into a drier. The SHAB bars shrink during drying and firing, the length is measured at each stage. The LDW sample is weighed wet, dry and fired. The tin can prevents the inner portion of the DFAC disk from drying and this sets up stresses that cause it to crack. The nature of the cracking pattern and its magnitude are recorded as a Drying Factor. The numbers from all of these measurements are recorded in my account at Insight-live. It can present a complete physical properties report that calculates things like drying shrinkage, firing shrinkage, water content and LOI (from the measured values).

Pages that reference this post in the Digitalfire Reference Library:

DFAC Drying Factor, LDW LOI/Density/Water Content, Physical Testing, Clay, Materials

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.