Calculation of optimal mixtures for frit production

Abstract

Many ceramic products are coated with frits obtained during the liquid-phase sintering process. The most important characteristics of these frits are dependent on the content of particular oxides in the raw-material mixture. Consequently, the quantities of raw powders have to be determined so that the oxide requirements can be satisfied. There also is a need to decrease production cost. Therefore, the raw-material mixture is regarded as an optimal mixture when it is made of the least expensive raw materials. This problem -- calculation of optimal recipes -- can be solved by a linear programming method. Linear programming was used by the authors to estimate optimal raw-material recipes for a few products taken from practice. It is shown that cost reduction is successfully performed by the linear programming procedure.