A new glass-ceramic red pigment

Recently in the traditional ceramic industry there has been an increasing interest in the obtainment of inclusion pigments to stabilize at the firing temperature and towards the actions of molten glasses unstable cromophore such as hematite or cadmium sulphoselenide. This work focuses on a new synthesis of hematite-zircon inclusion pigment obtained from sintering of non-conventional mixture of precursors. To this purpose a glass composition belonging to the Li2O-ZrO2-SiO2 system that during the sintering/devetrification steps crystallizes zircon has been chosen. The employment of two different Fe precursors (oxide and goethite) have been also analyzed. Finally, a mechanism of pigment formation is proposed. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.