Hydrophobic property of surface glaze of ceramic tiles by copper powder addition

Ceramic tiles, which are widely used as interior and exterior materials for construction, have recently been required to have pollution prevention function. In order to remove contaminants, many researches of ceramic tiles with hydrophilic surface property through TiO2 coating and hydrophobic surface property by improving the flow of water droplets have been proceeded. Expecially, it is very important to develop a surface glaze having hydrophobicity through a sintering process above 1000 degrees C without an additional coating process and the degradation of mechanical properties. In this study, surface glaze with copper powder was applied to manufacture of ceramic tile. Contact angle of ceramic tile according to thickness of surface glaze layer was investigated after the conventional sintering process. The contact angle of the ceramic tile surface without the copper powder was shown to be 25.3 degrees, which is close to hydrophilic surface. However, the contact angle was increased up to 109.8 degrees when the thickness of surface glaze with the copper powder was 150 mu m. The excellent hydrophobic property of the surface glaze with copper powder was resulted from the cellular structure of copper particles on the glaze surface. In addition, the mechanical properties of the developed hydrophobic ceramic tiles such as bending strength, chemical resistance, abrasion resistance, and frost resistance were well maintained and meet the criteria of 'KS L 1001 Ceramic tile'.