Porosity Control and Mechanical Properties of Porous Ceramic Material from Plered Region

Plered region is located in around Purwakarta area, west java, Indonesia. Plered is famous as ceramic product especially ceramic tiles, decorative ceramics, tableware and roof tiles. This paper investigated the manufacturing of porous ceramic from Plered and evaluated the mechanical properties especially bending strength. The investigation include the controlling of porosity using pore former during manufacturing, investigation of chemical composition and evaluated the fracture strength using bending test. Evaluation of porosity ceramic product use an archimedes method and scanning electron microscopy and the bending strength of porous ceramic using three point bending test. The porous ceramic was tailored by using compaction process and sintering process at temperature of 1250 C, the pore former (rice starch) was added on the material ceramic to control of porosity. The bending strength use standard ASTM C1161-13 which sample has cross section of 6x8 mm2 and 90 mm long. The results show that the porosity increases with the number of pore formers in a mixture of clay, the porosity of sinter ceramic was 7 vol%,12 vol%, 17 vol% at using pore former 5 wt%, 15 wt% and 25 wt % respectively. The bending strength of sinter ceramic was declined with increasing porosity. The bending strength of sintered ceramic was 58 MPa, 49.5 MPa and 34.7 MPa at porosity of 7 vol%, 9 vol% and 14 vol% respectively