Examining the Quality of Local Omani Clays for Ceramic Slip Casting in Art Schools: Testing Deflocculant, Specific Gravity, and Viscosity

Ceramicists at art schools are usually fascinated by the basic processes they use. Most of them have developed their own pottery hand building techniques, constructed their firing kilns, and even composed their individual clays and glaze recipes in laboratories. Slip casting is one of the techniques used in forming ceramics worldwide, where liquid clay is cast in a plaster mold to make ceramic pots. In fact, most educational art schools, ceramics factories, and pottery craft enterprises in Oman use expensive imported clays to cast in plaster molds. Considering recent developments in ceramic making fields, it is becoming extremely difficult to ignore the importance of developing local slip casting clays to support both the educational and industrial ceramic and pottery fields within a particular region. By examining the Alanwar Ceramic Tiles Plant (ACTP) sample of local clay, the experimental work presented here provides one of the first investigations into how educational and industrial enterprises can take advantage of local clays to produce slip casting slurries.