Low Temperature Firing

With a reduced temperature and firing time, our Flash Sintering technology can cut energy, emissions and costs. Find out more about this revolutionary technology here.

Spot Glaze Repair

Simple glaze faults, such as pinholes, in sanitaryware production are currently repaired by drilling out the fault, filling the drilled fault with raw glaze and then re-firing the item to fuse the glaze repair into the original glaze surface. This process is time-consuming and expensive because the whole item (e.g. cistern, sink) needs to be re-fired no matter how large or small the fault is.

Lucideon is developing a new glaze repair system that can be applied to sanitaryware glazes that does not require the whole item to be re-fired. We call it Spot Glaze Repair.

The principle behind the innovation is that our flash sintering technology can be used on a small scale to repair small areas of glaze faults by sintering just the area around the fault, and not the whole item. This application of flash sintering increases the speed of the repair process and reduces the risk of additional faults when re-firing the items, such as cracks from thermal shock.

Currently the innovative flash sintering technology is at the pilot scale level, but it is attracting a lot of interest from the sanitaryware manufacturing industry. This innovation will be ready for deployment in sanitaryware plants in the near future.

Antibacterial Coatings

Sanitaryware products can be prone to forming bacteria on their surfaces, and areas where such bacteria gather can cause a hazard to human health. Antibacterial agents, such as those included in household cleaning sprays can kill and remove bacteria from surfaces, but most of these types of products have a limited time period when they are active. This is especially the case in sanitary and food contact areas.

A possible way to improve the efficacy of ceramic surfaces is to have an inherent antibacterial action included in the glaze coating. By formulating new glazes Lucideon is able to produce a glaze with long term antibacterial properties that reduces the potential for bacterial growth. Additionally, these coatings can also potentially reduce the surface roughness of ceramics, which lowers the available sites that bacteria are able to adhere to, and this in turn reduces the amount of bacteria that is able to grow on the surface.