"Finishing Process. In ceramic tile production process, the finishing and surface treatment stage gives considerable added value to the materials, especially from the aesthetic point of view, by providing the tile with special aesthetic characteristics that are highly valued commercially. The aesthetic trends of the market require more and more products to have high intrinsic technical characteristics (reduced absorption, high surface hardness, abrasion resistance) that are typical of porcelain stoneware. This is combined with the requirement for a high aesthetic value of the surface in order to achieve effects that are increasingly closer to those of natural products (wood, marble, granite, quarry stone etc.). Therefore, along with technological development - and thanks to, or because of it - there has been a huge development in the aesthetic characteristics of the products that has led to mechanical treatment (polishing and lapping) of fired tiles becoming more or less adopted everywhere. Polishing is one of the key finishing processes used to improve the aesthetics of porcelain stoneware products. Its use makes it possible to highlight tone-on-tone and make the tile surface perfectly flat. To obtain this result usually lapping process is applied: a thickness of material between 0.3 and 0.5 mm, sometimes more, is removed, depending on the type of tile. Lapping literally means “Precision finishing performed by means of a very fine abrasive mounted on a lapping machine"": during this type of machining, only a minimum amount of the tile surface is removed and a gentle finishing process is performed, because the materials processed are usually partially enamelled or glazed.
Unfortunately, there is a negative side to machining surfaces after firing: it involves using a considerable amount of water, the equivalent to more than 125 litres per m2 processed, and generates and equally large amount of sludge and waste, which in addition to material removed, also contains process water.
By using the DRYLAP innovative process, BMR intends to create a globally innovative product that is not currently available on the market. DRYLAP will push the technology towards the correct use of environmental resources and to optimize and reduce direct pollution and pollution produced by the manufacturing of ceramic building materials. This will be achieved through the implementation of flexible technological cycles that are particularly suitable for any type of ceramic material, and therefore for every type of ceramic mix. This will help to reduce, if not completely eliminate, the problems related to the use of water and to reduce energy consumption used in the manufacture of ceramic products.
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