This company develops and licenses new technologies to transform regolith and waste materials such as mine tailings, quarry fines, coal fly ash into high quality ceramic products. These products include tile, brick, wall cladding and other structural materials.
Ceramext, LLC has developed innovative methods and compositions using regolith (such as basalt fines and similar rock fragments such as those found on Mars) and waste materials such as mine tailings and quarry fines to produce high quality ceramics. These methods include hot-forging and ceramic extrusion from regolith for habitat for humanity on Mars as well as Earth. Many suggested methods for using regolith fines for habitat construction in Space and on Earth involve either sintering or complete melting of the regolith. Sintering generally results in a relatively weak ceramic. Complete melting generally results in a porous glassy relatively weak ceramic. However, we have found that if a partially melted regolith is compressed, the ceramic tends to be stronger and denser. Also, the remaining unmelted fragments help produce a stronger ceramic since a fracture in the glass usually terminates at the unmelted fragment. The pressure can be direct as with a die, compressed by rollers, or by the backpressure through an extruder tube. Ceramext® technology can produce high quality ceramics by partially melting and compressing basalt or other regolith-like fines, including mine tailings, quarry fines, coal fly ash, and other waste materials. Many heating options are available including microwave, laser, solar, and electrical. No binders are required. The partially melted plastic material binds the unmelted particles to the newly melted glass, which will comprise some crystallites. Several pilot plant operations have already been made. The ceramics include tile, brick, wall cladding and other structural products. On Earth and in Space water is not required, binders are unnecessary, and manufacturing can be made in vacuum conditions. The resulting heated plastic material can be shaped, cooled and even reheated and reformed in a plastic state. It can be essentially impermeable with an absorption potential of less than 0.5%. The ceramic products have high strengths (generally with MOR’s of >10,000 psi, higher than Italian porcelain), high durability, low wear resistance with hardness generally at least 8 on Moh’s hardness scale (harder than quartz), excellent precision with size tolerances (less than 0.13 mm for tile), and low open and closed porosity. The ceramic from the regolith will tolerate sulfur and many contaminates. The Ceramext® composition patents cover a very broad range of materials that can be, when partially melted, pressed (as in a die), rolled, or extruded (in round, rectangular or other shapes). The Ceramext® technology includes US Patent Nos.: 7,704,907, 8,216, 955, and 8,901,023 titled “Synthesized Hybrid Rock Composition, Method, and Article Formed by the Method” (includes hot extruded ceramics, die pressed ceramics, roller pressed, and re-pressed ceramics); US Pat. No. 6,547,550, “Apparatus for Hot Vacuum Extrusion of Ceramics”; and, US Pat No. 9,102,569, “Process for Hot-Forging Synthetic Ceramic” (for which several thousand square feet of tile have been produced in pilot plants). See www.ceramext.com regarding Ceramext foreign patents and general information.
