Translucent colored porcelain for decorative lighting fixtures

Abstract

Traditional translucent porcelains are commonly used to produce tableware. Recently, a modern tendency has been identified to use translucent porcelain in the production of luxurious decorative artifacts, such as luminaires for the environment decoration. In this paper, a ceramic formulation was developed to obtain a colored and translucent porcelain, whose objective was obtaining colored pieces without the colored glaze application. Luminaire prototypes for environment decoration were produced using a triaxial ceramic mass (kaolin, quartz and feldspar) with the addition of bentonite and wollastonite. Black copper oxide (CuO) was used as a pigment to coloring the ceramic mass used for the translucent porcelain production. The optimum CuO content was 0.5 wt%, which resulted in a translucent green porcelain after sintering in air at 1250 °C for 1 h. The translucent colored porcelain provided a distinctive decorative effect compared to the traditional translucent porcelain without the addition of pigments.

Keywords:
porcelain; translucent; transmittance; decoration