Development of Bone Ash from Eppawala Apatite - Sri Lanka as a Raw Material for Bone China Production

Bone china is popular high grade porcelain with excellent characteristic features including translucency, whiteness, and high strength. Among its different components, Bone ash is recognized as the major raw material that provides above properties. However, as Bone ash is sourced from animal bones, its usage has some limitations. Therefore, finding other alternative sources for bone ash is an urgent matter. In this work, a novel bone china recipe was developed using a synthesized Bone ash analogue. The synthesized Bone ash analogue was produced by heat treating Eppawala apatite with calcium hydroxide. The product was then calcined at 900°C and characterized using Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR), X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) and X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy. The FTIR results indicated that both synthesized sample and commercial bone ash have the characteristic, PO₄^3- and OH^- functional groups. The XRD and XRF data respectively revealed that the synthesized sample has the hexagonal crystal structure and very close chemical composition inherently match with the commercial bone ash. Finally, the novel bone china recipes were prepared by adding synthesized product partially with commercial bone ash. Among the prepared samples, the best product was fabricated after the addition of 5% bone ash analogue. However, high amount of bone ash analogue (50%) was not viable to cast by slip casting method. Therefore, it could be mentioned that even though the synthesized bone ash analogue is structurally, chemically, physically similar to commercially available bone ash, it could not totally replace the commercial one. However, there is a possibility to add some amount of synthesized bone ash analogue keeping the required quality of the industrial standard.