Usage
Ball clays are used in making everyday articles including:
- wall and floor tiles, wash basins, toilet bowls, plates, cups and saucers, linoleum, acoustic ceiling tiles, insulated electrical cables, pale coloured bricks, and clay drainage pipes
- windscreen wipers, spark plugs, and engine mountings
- hoses and fertilisers
- pharmaceutical and polymers and many others
- kiln furniture
Ball Clay has been very important in the way our living standards have developed. Without the porcelain insulators from which overhead cables are suspended, there could be no high-tension electricicity distribution grid. Without porcelain insulators the spark plug and the internal combustion engine may not have existed. Without the far-from-romantic products of the vitreous china sanitaryware industry, modern sanitation would have been impossible, Without Ball Clays to bind refractory materials, a whole host of metallurigical and engineering processes could not be carried out. Without powdered clay, many forms of animal food - and hence milk and meat and eggs in the past- would have been more expensive, and many types of fertiliser would have been difficult if not impossible to spread satifactorily on agricultural land. The list of uses for Ball Clays is surprisingly long, and many are not ceramic applications at all.
Read more about this topic: Purbeck Ball Clay
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