Manufacturing of Tiles from Kieselguhr Sludge /Diatomaceous Earth/

Abstract

Diatomaceous earth sludge this has a negative impact on the ecosystem because kieselguhr has some heavy metals which poison the environment and it has cementing behavior that cause desertification. But kieselguhr is able to produce the simplest unit of tiles and becomes beneficial for the process economy of the factories. The objective of this project was to prepared floor tiles from the brewery filtration by product so-called kieselguhr. The primary one was pretreatment of the brewery by product by the help of bases (NaOH) in order to make it neutralize. The next task was mixing of the raw materials (kieselguhr, sand, fifty percent cement water and aggregate) using their standard ratio. After this molding and drying of bricks has done. The required tiles must be with the require shape, so in this project the task of molding was done to give the shape for the bricks. Later, the tiles were dried using sun light from 14–28 days to remove its moisture. The parameters which were checked during this project work were Compression strength, percentage water absorption, moisture content and density. The experimental result showed that it was not as expected to produce floor tiles from pure 100%kieselguhr in the replacement of cement, but by mixing through the percentage ratio of 50% of kieselguhr with the remaining percentage of cement was used to produce floor tiles. As the result showed the compression strength and the percentage water absorption mainly depends on the porosity.