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During the initial heating of hydraulically bonded castable refractories, dehydration of cement phases causes build-up of high levels of internal steam pressure. If this pressure exceeds material strength, explosive spalling results. A probe capable of measuring internal steam pressures"in-situ" has been developed and tested. Correlation of cement calorimetry and pressure data suggests that castable heating schedules can be modified to reduce explosive spalling. / Master of Science

The focus of this thesis is the study of behavior of brick waste in the mixture with high alumina cement. The result of this research should be a draft of a composition and production process for material that could partly or fully substitute forging accessories in the brick production industry. The aim of this work is to verify the use of brick waste for such purpose. Usage of brick waste for refractories can help the current long-term effort for wasteless production processes.

In recent years, scientific studies are carried out to find new refractory material. Having good mechanical properties under very high temperatures, refractories are widely used in industries like iron, steel, glass, cement and pottery. Researches are focused on monolithic refractory making because of their superior properties comparing to conventional firebrick refractories. Providing a mono-block body, having no joints makes the monolithic refractories more durable at elevated temperatures. Easier production and installation are two main points that people are choosing monolithic refractories, thus an economy is made. In this study, for monolithic refractory production, high alumina cement was used as binding material. It is known that the increase in alumina (Al2O3) content increases the high temperature resistance, so that crushed firebrick, having 85% Al2O3 was used as aggregate. Pozzolanic materials, which are silica fume, fly ash, ground granulated firebrick and ground granulated blast furnace slag, were added to improve physical and mechanical properties of mortar. With the addition of steel fibres, change in compressive strength and flexural strength was observed.Superplasticizer was used to understand its behaviour under high temperatures. Portland cement containing mortars were also prepared to make comparison with high alumina cement containing specimens. Specimens were prepared in 5x5x5 cm and 4x4x16 cm prisms. They were cured for one day at curing room, then heated to 105&deg / C and then heated to 1100&deg / C. Weight, size and ultrasound velocity change, compressive strength and flexural strength tests were done to determine physical and mechanical properties of the monolithic refractories, before and after heating. Heated and non-heated specimens were pulverized for microstructural investigation with X-Ray diffraction (XRD) method. Using high alumina cement with 50 &ndash / 60 % granulated blast furnace slag or granulated firebrick, by the weight of cement, and crushed firebrick as aggregate, a satisfactory monolithic refractory material was made. It was observed that, mechanical properties were decreased at the Portland cement used mortars after several times of heating and cooling cycles. Also, it was determined that the microstructure of the high alumina cement containing mortars did not deteriorate much at 1100&deg / C, as long as there was no change observed from the results.

This thesis explores the posibility of using of foundry filter ash for production of inorganic composite materials, that could be used primary in the construction industry. The thesis is divided into theoretical and experimental section, where theoretical section contain literature review of used materials and the experimental section summarizes the results of laboratory tests performed on tested mixture based on portland and alumina cement with various content of foundry filter ash. For comparison was also used another foundry waste - foundry sand. Prepared test bodies with dimension of 40 x 40x 160 mm was subjected to mechanical strength tests and the influence of amount of foundry waste on the strenght of the prepared mixtures was monitored. Next the thesis deals with possibilities of alkaline activation of foundry waste, where sodium water glass, sodium hydroxide and commercially supplied baucis L 160 component B were used as alkaline activator. These test mixtures were also subjected to mechanical strenght tests and the influence of amount of foundry waste on the strenght was observed too. The analysis of input materials were performed by XRF, TG – DTA – EGA and XRD powder diffraction methods. All strength tests were tested by testing equipment desttest 4310.

The use of thermal storage energy, using phase change materials appears to be an effective way to store thermal energy storage with the benefits of the high amount of energy while maintaining isothermal nature of the process. PCM methods are used in latent thermal storage systems for heat pumps, as well as in solar engineering or for temperature control in spacecraft. The past decade has extended these principles for cooling and heating in the building. There are a number of PCM systems, which operate over a wide temperature range, are used in various applications. This document includes a brief overview of the development and analysis of available thermal storage working mainly on the principle of PCM.