Light Reflectance Characterization of Waste Glass Coating for Tiles

Abstract

Glass wastes that come from recycling plants do not often find a proper use, thus, they are discarded. In order to find future uses for these wastes, this paper explores the characterization of waste glasses (WGs) as a raw material through the assessment of their light reflectance if they were used for external coatings in building materials. To this aim, in this research, several clay-tile specimens were fabricated and coated with three different compositions of waste glass. For these specimens, three variables were analyzed to serve for this WG-based coating characterization: thickness of WG coating, temperature, and holding time of burning. The resulting WG-coated tiles were assessed in terms of the light spectral reflectance and whiteness index, with the help of a fiber optic spectrometer. Results show that the composition of WG had a very significant influence on the light spectral reflectance and the degree of whiteness, with holding time and WG thickness being the most influential depending on the WG type. The temperature of burning was also shown to be critical for the densification process. Finally, an interpretation of these results based on the WG chemical composition coatings obtained by XRF is discussed in this paper.