The refractories industry is increasingly finding that the current standards do not meet the increasing requirements of the market.  The ReStaR project was developed to help identify the relevant factors, reliability and reproducibility of current standards, and where they were found wanting, to produce agreed guidelines to improve them.  The research focussed on defining the variables and conditions that should be controlled to achieve replicable testing procedures in any testing house using the new guidelines for standards.  Also identified through the project were factors in testing which do not have any significant impact on the reproducibility of results but were being over controlled unnecessarily.  The range of tests that were reviewed include bulk density, apparent porosity, cold crushing strength, refractories under load, permanent linear change and the modulus of rupture.

The final meeting marked the end of the investigation stage and was concluded with a final and agreed set of guidelines that should be applied to refractory testing for both shaped (fired bricks etc.) and unshaped (pre-mix refractory concretes etc.) materials.  The agreed guidelines and data from the research that was used to develop them will be published by the partners involved in the project in the coming months.  From the implementation of these guidelines it is believed that test laboratories, regardless of size and location, will be able to reproduce results when testing like for like materials and also make variations in test results more attributable to material property differences rather than discrepancies in test methods.  In the long term it is hoped that the value these guidelines will provide will be implemented into new standards set for the industry as a whole.

Lucideon provides testing, materials and method development and consultancy to the refractories industry through its accredited laboratories.  If you would like to learn more about the new refractory guidelines or Lucideon’s services to the refractory industry then please contact Dr Richard White at richard.white@lucideon.com or click here.

ReStaR is a collaborative project that has been undertaken by Lucideon and 12 other consortium partners:  European Centre for Refractories (Coordinator), Cerame-Unie / European Refractories Producers Federation, Forschungsgemeinschaft Feuerfest e.V, Instituto Tecnologico de Materiales, ICAR, Instytut Ceramiki i Materialow Budowlanych, Centre de Recherches de l'industrie Belge de la Céramique, RHI, Calderys, Etablissement Haasser, Refractaria S.A and Comité Européen de Normalisation.  This research has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme.