Ceramic sanitary wares: Prediction of the deformed shape after the production process

Ceramic materials are nowadays widely used in many industrial applications, ranging from the production of sanitary wares to advanced mechanics. Despite their diffusion, their production process still involves inefficient product development procedures, often based on a trial and error approach. In particular, during drying and firing, the initial shape given by the mould undergoes significant deformations due to plastic strains and volumetric shrinkage. As a consequence, the prediction of the mould shape, needed to obtain a given final product, becomes a problem of primary importance. The first step towards the definition of an effective mould prediction procedure is to accurately simulate the whole industrial process. The aim of the present paper is to build an effective, yet simple, simulation procedure suitable for implementation in the industrial practice. In this article, the adopted modelling strategy is discussed and the results of the numerical model are compared with experimental data highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The arguments discussed in the paper have been addressed in collaboration with SACMI, a world leading company in the production of machineries for the ceramic industry.