The choice of appropriate locally sourced refractory materials for lining of locally
produced furnaces has remained a major concern in which numerous efforts has been
put in place to enhance the performance of the local contents of furnace lining
materials. This study investigates the effects of certain additives such as Pulverized
Glass Wastes (PGW) and Bentonite on some selected refractory properties of ant-hill
clay. 100% finely-ground ant-hill clay, clean water and proportionate amount of
Bentonite and PGW were manually mixed, consolidated and oven-dried at 110 oC for
a period of 8 hours at varying additives percentages. Compressive strength, apparent
porosity, permeability, filtration rate, thermal conductivity and bulk density were experimentally determined... The results showed that the compressive strength, bulk
density and thermal conductivity of Ant-hill clay increased significantly on addition of
additives while there was corresponding decrease in the values of the filtration rate,
apparent porosity and permeability. These values were enhanced by Bentonite and
pulverised glass waste additions to the Ant-hill clay. The test results for the compressive
strength, thermal conductivity, filtration rate, apparent porosity, bulk density and
permeability of no-additive clay samples are 156.4 N/m2
, 0.0028 W/m2K, 0.0041cm3
/s,
0.0009 %, 6.3 g/cm3
and 0.0012 cm/s, respectively. However, the sample-mix consisting
100% ant-hill clay with 80% PGW and 20% Bentonite produced 333.4 N/m2
, 0.0032
W/m2K, 0.0037 cm3
/s, 0.00018 %, 9.5 g/cm3
and 0.0015 cm/s as optimum values for the
compressive strength, thermal conductivity, filtration rate, apparent porosity, bulk
density and permeability, respectively. Therefore, 80%PGW/20%Bentonite additives
gave the optimum results for the production of refractory clay blocks for furnace linin