Porcelain shrinkage after firing:
a- 1-5%
b- 5-10%
c- 10-20%***
At a firing temperature of 1400° C, they shrink by 16 percent.
Porcelain is a fine and translucent ceramic that, if it is produced from kaolin by baking at over 1,200 ° C, takes on the more precise name of hard porcelain. It is mostly used in the arts of the table.
The techniques of porcelain manufacture reached their perfection in China in the twelfth century, in Germany in the eighteenth century, and in France at Limoges in the nineteenth century.
If the British use the terms China or Bone china to designate respectively hard porcelain and a softer porcelain spread in the United Kingdom, this ceramic is called porcellana by the Italians who bring it back from China in the fifteenth century.
It is named after the appearance of Cypraea shells, which they believed to have been extracted.
The oldest Chinese porcelain seen in Europe is a 12 cm tall vase dating from the end of the 13th or beginning of the 14th century preserved in the treasure of St. Mark of Venice. It is called the Marco Polo vase, although it is not certain, nor indeed impossible, that it was brought back from China by one of the Polo.
After long scientific debates, the experts of the Chinese ceramics consider today that it is under the Eastern Han dynasty (between -206 and 220 AD) that appeared the first real porcelains. To arrive at this conclusion, they developed a set of criteria involving the firing temperature (1260 to 1300 ° C), the proportion of kaolin (30 to 60%), the iron oxide content. (less than 1.7%), the porosity rate (0.6%), the absorption rate (0.3%), the translucent appearance (up to 5 to 8 mm), or the resonance to shock.
The cooking process up to about 1200 ° C and vitrified white pottery using pasta mainly composed of kaolin have existed in China since the third century at least, although at that time the vast majority of ceramics were in fact simple potteries, or, at best, sandstones. This very ancient discovery of porcelain was a technical triumph in the field of ceramics, even if it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to see flowing into Europe porcelains "egg shells" whose thin walls put worth the translucent character.
At a firing temperature of 1400° C, they shrink by 16 percent.
Porcelain is a fine and translucent ceramic that, if it is produced from kaolin by baking at over 1,200 ° C, takes on the more precise name of hard porcelain. It is mostly used in the arts of the table.
The techniques of porcelain manufacture reached their perfection in China in the twelfth century, in Germany in the eighteenth century, and in France at Limoges in the nineteenth century.
If the British use the terms China or Bone china to designate respectively hard porcelain and a softer porcelain spread in the United Kingdom, this ceramic is called porcellana by the Italians who bring it back from China in the fifteenth century.
It is named after the appearance of Cypraea shells, which they believed to have been extracted.
The oldest Chinese porcelain seen in Europe is a 12 cm tall vase dating from the end of the 13th or beginning of the 14th century preserved in the treasure of St. Mark of Venice. It is called the Marco Polo vase, although it is not certain, nor indeed impossible, that it was brought back from China by one of the Polo.
After long scientific debates, the experts of the Chinese ceramics consider today that it is under the Eastern Han dynasty (between -206 and 220 AD) that appeared the first real porcelains. To arrive at this conclusion, they developed a set of criteria involving the firing temperature (1260 to 1300 ° C), the proportion of kaolin (30 to 60%), the iron oxide content. (less than 1.7%), the porosity rate (0.6%), the absorption rate (0.3%), the translucent appearance (up to 5 to 8 mm), or the resonance to shock.
The cooking process up to about 1200 ° C and vitrified white pottery using pasta mainly composed of kaolin have existed in China since the third century at least, although at that time the vast majority of ceramics were in fact simple potteries, or, at best, sandstones. This very ancient discovery of porcelain was a technical triumph in the field of ceramics, even if it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to see flowing into Europe porcelains "egg shells" whose thin walls put worth the translucent character.
