NEW INSTRUMENTS FOR DETERMINING DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF LARGE SIZE TILES

The standards for the ceramic tiles certification were developed for traditional-sized products, when large size ceramic tiles had not reached current market volumes. Consequently, the applicability of these test methods, tuned up to characterise a product according to a standard, in some cases is arduous. It occurs, for example, when measuring the dimensional characteristics (as stated in the standard ENISO 10545-2) of ceramic tiles having dimensions larger than 60x60 cm. In order to fill the gap between the test methods usually used in the laboratories and the need to certificate these novel products, some techniques, new to the ceramic field, but widely used in other industrial fields, were analysed. To this aim two new instruments were used to perform the measurements, a coordinate measuring machine CMM and a portable three-dimensional measuring arm, comparing the results with those obtained with a data-plucometer, traditionally used to perform the test. The analysis was conducted on tiles having dimensions lower than those usually named as “large size tiles”, with the aim to demonstrate the possibility to use these new techniques also for the ceramic purposes. The work done to set up the software used to elaborate the data acquired allowed the testingto be conducted following exactly the abovementioned ISO standard. The experimental campaign conducted showed a good agreement between the data-plucometer results and the results obtained with the new techniques, confirming the possibility to use these last ones to perform the tests on large size ceramic slabs. Moreover, the work highlighted some insights to open discussion on normalisation tables.