Technical ceramics are used in diverse fields. These include medical engineering (e.g. dental or hip prosthesis), machine and plant engineering, electrical engineering, and aerospace technology. Thus, there is hardly any area of life where ceramics are not used.This diverse usage requires special qualities depending on the composition of the ceramics. Even small deviations can make a material useless for the planned application. Thus the material analysis of ceramics has become an important aspect of the quality management.
According to the requirements, terrachem’s analysis services are applied either to the raw materials or the finished product. Whatever your requirements are, at terrachem you will find a competent and dedicated contact person for any aspects of material analysis of ceramics.
Oxide materials are analyzed using a high temperature fusion treatment. However there are many problems requiring the proportions of volatiles such as fluorine, chlorine, sulfur and boron. Here we use a pellet since it is not possible to analyze these elements using the high temperature treatment because most of the volatiles mentioned above would be lost. Regarding this field of application we use again our special method called solid press. This method operates without pressing aids. Light elements profit in particular from this method since the use of pressing aids would negatively affect the quality of the analysis.
Material analysis of ceramics: application examples
As a recent example, we converted a program for measuring enamel from the melt to pellet. Thus it is now possible to determine the fluorine and B2O3 proportions with high accuracy. This is also due to the fact that the material is amorphous.