Ceramic machinery is the set of presses and kilns that make ceramic tiles, washbasins and toilets, together with the machines that mould bottle caps. Ceramic means a hard product made from clay or powder that is shaped and then fired at high heat. It is a branch of special-purpose machinery.
A tile works makes a tile in a few stages. The raw clay and minerals are ground and dried into a powder. A press squeezes the powder into the shape of a tile. The tile is dried, glazed and decorated by a printer, and fired in a long kiln. Cameras, as described under machine vision, check each tile at the end for cracks and for colour differences.
Two costs matter most in a tile works: fuel and wasted tiles. A kiln burns gas or another fuel all day, so a kiln that wastes heat raises the cost of every tile. And a tile that cracks in the kiln is lost, along with the fuel that fired it. Modern lines print the design on the tile with an inkjet printer, which changes designs in minutes. The makers of ceramic machinery sell the press, the kiln and the printer as one line, and Italian companies are among the best known.
Say a tile works in Morbi, Gujarat, India's best-known centre for ceramic tiles, produces a 60 cm by 60 cm floor tile. The press shapes the powder at high pressure. The tile then travels for about 40 to 60 minutes through a kiln, where it reaches roughly 1,200 °C. A camera at the end rejects tiles whose colour does not match the rest of the batch.
The same press-and-mould idea is used for bottle caps. Many caps are made by compression moulding: a press squeezes a lump of soft, hot plastic in a cap-shaped mould. Other caps are made by injection moulding.
A kiln runs for months without stopping, and a failure ruins a lot of tiles. So tile works use predictive maintenance to watch the press and the kiln fans.