Polished tiles are loved by consumers because of their hardness, wear resistance, and suitability for large indoor and outdoor paving. However, the concave and convex pores left by polished tiles during production can hide dirt and dirt, making it easy for pollutants to penetrate the surface. For example, some coffee or tea poured on polished tiles cannot be cured.
Later, some high-quality polished tiles were added with an anti-fouling layer when they left the factory, but this anti-fouling layer made the polished tiles lose the effect of full-body tiles. If you want to continue to make the whole body, you have to continue to apply the anti-fouling layer. The decoration industry also practices applying water wax before construction to prevent stains. Therefore, anti-fouling treatment technology has become a compulsory course for good polished tile products.
Polished tile effect glaze is different from decorative methods such as infiltration and large particles. It uses special special frits mixed with base materials and then pressed or applied to the brick surface through special screen printing. After firing, it is polished to produce decorative effects such as particles or patterns of different colors.
How to choose polished tiles correctly
Look
Look at the color uniformity and surface finish of the tiles. Take out four or five tiles from a box and check for defects such as color difference, deformation, missing edges, and corners.
Knock
Tap the tile body with a hard object. The crisper the sound, the higher the vitrification degree and the better the quality. You can also hold a corner of the tile with your left thumb, index finger, and middle finger, and hang it down easily. Use your right index finger to tap the middle and lower part of the tile. If the sound is clear and pleasant, it means that the polished tile is very good. If the sound is dull and stagnant, it is of course not good.
Water dripping
Drop colored water drops (such as ink) on the front of the tile, let it stand for one minute, and then wipe it with a wet cloth. If there are traces on the tile surface, it means that dirt has been absorbed into the tile; if the tile surface is still as bright as a mirror, it means that the tile does not absorb dirt and is easy to clean, and the polished tile is of good quality.
Measurement
The higher the accuracy of the edge length of the tile, the better the effect after paving. Buying high-quality tiles is not only easy to construct but also saves labor time and auxiliary materials. Use a tape measure to measure the size and perimeter of each tile for differences. The higher the accuracy, the better the quality.
Scratch
The tiles are good in hardness, and toughness, and are not easy to break. Scratch the edges and corners of the broken tiles to check whether the broken fragments are dense or loose, whether they are brittle, hard, loose, or soft, and whether they leave scratches or scatter powder. If it is the former, it is good, and if it is the latter, it is bad. Sprinkle water on the surface of the tile.
Polished tile antifouling agent
At present, polished tiles are basically coated with a layer of antifouling agent to improve the antifouling ability of polished tiles, but the quality of various antifouling agent products is not the same, and the antifouling ability varies greatly. Therefore, it is necessary to have a comprehensive understanding of polished tile antifouling agents.
Antifouling agents can be divided into oily antifouling agents and water-based antifouling agents according to different solvents; according to appearance, they can be divided into liquid antifouling agents and solid antifouling agents. At present, with the widespread use of waxing machines, manufacturers use the most liquid antifouling agents, and most of them are oily. Antifouling agents can be divided into three categories according to different product categories: wax products, latex products, and silicone products. Polishing wax products were once widely used because of their low price, but the anti-fouling effect is not ideal and the anti-fouling time is short. Therefore, it is no longer a mainstream product; latex products are water-based systems. At present, due to the immature technology and the inferior anti-fouling performance of oil-based products, they have not been accepted by most manufacturers; silicone products are increasingly widely used by many manufacturers due to their excellent penetration ability and long-term effective anti-fouling performance, and their market prospects are very broad. Generally, silicone products use synthetic polymers to form an effective solid film around the opening hole and use the method of effectively reducing surface tension to prevent dirt from entering the hole, thereby achieving the purpose of anti-fouling.
Function of anti-fouling agent
The function of the anti-fouling agent is mainly reflected in two aspects: 1. Preventing cement slurry and rubber prints during tile paving. During the paving process, cement slurry is often applied to the surface of polished tiles. Once it enters the pores of the tiles, it is difficult to clean it off.
Preventing ink, tea juice, and shoe prints in daily life. At present, many antifouling agents on the market can resist ink, but not cement marks, shoe prints, and rubber prints. Shoe prints are a problem that must be overcome during the construction process. In the process of laying polished tiles, workers often use rubber hammers to knock on the tile surface to adjust the parallelism of the tiles, but black knocking marks will be left on the tile surface, which is equivalent to the rubber shoe prints on the tile surface. Therefore, the anti-shoe print performance of the antifouling agent is very important.
Antifouling agent quality performance
To measure the quality of certain antifouling agents, their advantages and disadvantages can be examined from the following aspects:
(1) Antifouling effect. This is the most important and fundamental indicator of antifouling agents.
(2) Anti-shoe print, rubber print, and cement slurry performance.
(3) Antifouling agent drying speed. If it dries too fast, it cannot be operated; if it dries too slowly, it will not dry when it is packaged, which will affect the product quality.
(4) The glossiness of the polished tile surface. A good antifouling agent can not only improve the antifouling property of the product but also effectively improve the glossiness of the product.
(5) Harmless to the human body. Many antifouling agents on the market currently use chemical raw materials that are harmful to the human body (such as toluene, chloroform, etc.). They have a strong irritating odor and will have an adverse effect on the health of the operators.
(6) No erosion effect on foam packaging materials. Some antifouling agents will react with foam products and can destroy the appearance and performance of packaging materials.
Polished tile antifouling technology
The antifouling principle of polished tiles uses the principle of solid surface modification, that is, to use the adsorption characteristics of the solid surface through various surface treatments to change the structure and properties of the solid surface. Antifouling substances, also known as surfactants, will form an adsorption film on the surface of the tile after surface modification. These films are hydrophobic so that the tile has an antifouling effect. Silicone and fluorine-containing polymers are widely used in the field of polished tile antifouling due to their low surface tension, excellent weather resistance and durability, and chemical reactivity.
1 Wax, organic coating, and hydrophobic surfactant antifouling technology Wax and organic coating are more commonly used polished tile surface antifouling treatment agents, but the effect has been unsatisfactory. Although waxing can prevent stains, the surface tension of wax is large, and the time it stays on the surface of tiles is short. Moreover, wax is a coating material and an airtight sealant. After waxing, water and moisture from the outside cannot enter the interior of the tile, isolating water vapor, and has a good anti-fouling effect. However, wax is prone to yellowing when exposed to air and sunlight for a long time. In addition, the wax film is easy to wear, and the anti-fouling effect is short-lived. In addition, the wax itself is easy to be contaminated, and fine particles such as dust will be embedded in the wax to form a wax scale, which is very inconvenient to clean. Therefore, waxing is not a good anti-fouling measure. In addition, applying an organic coating will affect the glossiness of the polished tile surface. Hydrophobic surfactants have low surface tension. Small molecule hydrophobic surfactants mainly include stearic acid, palmitic acid, oleic acid, cyclohexane acid mixture, rosin acid, and their alkali metal water-soluble salts, and their surface tension is relatively large, between 30 and 40 mNm. The surface of the treated tiles adsorbs and forms a thin hydrophobic layer, which has a certain anti-fouling effect. However, since it is only adsorbed on the surface and not firmly bonded, it is easy to fall off under the action of external force or the impact of water flow and lose its anti-fouling effect. The durability and anti-fouling efficiency are poor.
