HyperGlaze Tips

Stan Sulewski sent in the following story about teaching a glaze class this summer at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, and how he used HyperGlaze with his students to solve a number of problems. He DID teach the class hand glaze calculation first, but the students really appreciated having HyperGlaze to do calculations faster!

Stan writes:

We solved a number of problems efficiently using HyperGlaze. Our methodology was to create a new card for each new glaze, then call up the Glaze Limits window, and pressing the ‘Get Current Glaze’ button. Then we duplicated the original card and made changes to the original glaze, using the original glaze’s UMF in the Glaze Limits window for reference.

For example, a pink glaze that used tin oxide and rutile shivered and ran badly. It had a very high Si:Al. We made several adjustments, raising the alumina and lowering the alkali, creating a new glaze that doesn’t shiver, doesn’t run too much and has a richer color. In another, the end members for a Gloss to Matte Line Blend were created. First, the gloss was entered in HyperGlaze. It’s Si:Al was 11.7:1. We chose 4.3:1 Si:Al for the matte, adjusting clay, silica and alumina hydrate to achieve the target. The end members had the same refractory to flux ratio (RO2 +R2O3). By executing an 11-member line blend, the student developed a range of textures from gloss to matte. A third example was one of the school’s chrome-tin pink glazes that had some problems with color stability. The UMF showed a fairly high combination of amphoteric oxides (alumina and boron) that I have found to be detrimental to the color. Lowering the amphoterics by .07 in the UMF was enough to stabilize the color. The new glaze holds color even where it’s thin, like on the corners of embossments. The final example was a conversion of a cone 10 glaze to cone 6. It was accomplished by exchanging lower melting fluxes for portions of higher melting ones (e.g. Li & Na for K, Sr for Mg) and lowering the refractory to flux ratio from 3.5:1 to 3.2:1. All changes were dispatched in short order using HyperGlaze.

These are just a few of many examples that the class resolved during our five week course. HyperGlaze enabled students to generate new formulas quickly so that more tests could be done in a relatively short amount of time.