Filling plants for innovative heavy clay products with added value
A decade ago, at “Bau” 2001, Schlagmann introduced a perlite-filled brick called the Poroton T9. Bucking the trend toward increasingly filigreed perforation patterns, this compact clay masonry unit featured large, perlite-filled chambers. Then, at “Bau” 2007, a number of other brick and block producers exhibited similar stuffed products. And now, stuffed bricks and blocks have become well established on the German and, to some extent, the international markets. This market review explains what it takes to produce stuffed bricks and blocks.
1 Stuffed clay masonry units
Schlagmann, the pioneer in the field of stuffed-brick engineering, uses perlite – a natural volcanic rock (»1) – as filling material. The Poroton T9, with its uniformly sized chambers, occupies the apparent-density category 0.65 and has a design-level thermal conductivity of lR = 0.09 W/mK. The even more advanced Poroton T7 achieves design-level thermal conductivity amounting to lR = 0.07 W/mK in the 0.55 apparent density category. In contrast to the T9 model, the T7 has three large, outlying perlite chambers that make for a U-value of 0.15 W/m2K in single-leaf,...
