Compressive Creep Performance and High Temperature Dimensional Stability of Conventional Silica Refractories

Furnace designers and refractory engineers recognize that optimized furnace superstructure design and refractory selection are needed as glass production furnaces are continually striving toward greater output and efficiencies. Harsher operating conditions test refractories to the limit, while changing production technology (such as the conversion to oxy-fuel from traditional air-fuel firing) can alter the way the materials perform. Refractories for both oxy- and air-fuel fired furnace superstructures are subjected to high temperatures during service that may cause them to excessively creep or subside if the refractory material is not creep resistant, or if it is subjected to high stress, or both. Furnace designers can ensure that superstructure structural integrity is maintained if the creep behavior of the refractory material is well understood and well represented by appropriate engineering creep models. Several issues limit the abilities of furnace designers to (1) choose the optimum refractory for their applications, (2) optimize the engineering design, or (3) predict the service mechanical integrity of their furnace superstructures. Published engineering creep data are essentially non-existent for almost all commercially available refractories used for glass furnace superstructures. The limited data that do exist are supplied by the various refractory suppliers. Unfortunately, these suppliers generally have different ways of conducting their mechanical testing and they also interpret and report their data differently; this makes it hard for furnace designers to draw fair comparisons between competing grades of candidate refractories. Furthermore, the refractory supplier's data are often not available in a form that can be readily used for furnace design and for the prediction and design of long-term structural integrity of furnace superstructures. With the aim of providing such comparable data, the US DOE's Office of Industrial Technology and its Advanced Industrial Materials program is sponsoring work to conduct creep testing and analysis on refractories of interest to the glass industry. An earlier stage of the project involved identifying which refractories to test and this is described elsewhere. Conventional silica was one such identified refractory category, and the present report describes the creep behavior of this class of refractories. To portray a more complete understanding of how these refractories perform at service temperatures, their fundamental corrosion resistances, dimensional stabilities, and microstructure were characterized as well