Application of an Experimental Design for Optimizing the Conditions of Ceramic Membranes Elaboration

The present work is focused on studying the porosity of a ceramic membrane elaborated using aspects of the experimental design. A complete factorial design 23 was developed in order to study the effect of physical and chemical characteristics of flat or tubular membranes based on Moroccan clay. The main factors investigated are the sintering temperature as a thermal parameter, the granulometry for the particle size distribution, and the starch content being an organic additive that contributes to the final porosity. The experimental results showed that the powder of clay has to be crushed and sieved at 125 μm, the sintering temperature support as 850 °C and the starch content as 10%. The optimization of the results revealed that the response value of porosity is 40.775%. Finally, the experimental design allows us to better understand the correlation between process variables and to interpret test results.