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Colorants and ink for ceramics

Last years the market of ceramic and porcelain tile demonstrates stable rise: growth rate are within 109% -118%. The main segments of ceramic and porcelain tile consumption are residential and non-residential realty like industrial buildings, shopping centers, offices, administrative buildings, warehouses, etc.

The total demand for ceramic and porcelain tiles in 2009 was about 150 million square meters. The main trend in the production of ceramic tiles is constant growth level of floor tiles and reduction level of interior wall tiles. About 75% of ceramic tiles market in Russia is occupied by domestic manufacturers. General trend of domestic ceramic tile production is clear movement in higher price segment by increasing quality of end product: modernization of production lines according to ceramic industrial leader’s standard. The main importers on Russian market are China, Belarus, Spain and Italy.

It is very difficult to evaluate the capacity of the world ceramic market. But it is well known fact that the capacity of largest ceramic coatings producer is about 200 000 square meters of ceramic per day and bear in mind that about 85% of this volume is pottery with printed image (decorated, textured etc). This fact brings us to clear understanding that total consumption of colorants for ceramics is about several tons per month only for this production line. The capacity of market for digital ceramic printing is huge today and strongly depends on technology availability and cost for end users.

The large-scale production of ceramics coatings used flexography or screen printing as the main method for decoration. The disadvantages of this technique are well known: identical products, not enough exclusivity for end users and poor flexibility of production line.

The possible solution of this problem is the inkjet digital printing technology on the ceramic directly by ceramic ink with following thermal treatment in order to fix the image on the surface of ceramic material. This technique allows us unlimited freedom in selection of decoration style for ceramic (images, photo, texture etc). The main problem in ceramic is high requirements of decoration image to mechanical stress and corrosive environment, light and heat. Service life of the finished product should be about 25 years. In this case such technology will be interesting for ceramic market. Such high requirements can be provided by usage of inorganic colorants on the basis of complexes and salts of different metals.

Our chemists carefully selected samples of inorganic colorants which can be successfully used for ceramic decoration and provide product life even more than 25 years. At the moment, there are several experimental batches of ink under testing in our laboratory and the laboratory of SB RAS. In near future we are going to provide the digital inkjet printing technology for ceramic and glass manufacturers as alternative technique for product decoration.