Cenospheres

Cenospheres are hollow vitreous spheres arising as a small proportion of the waste ashes from certain coal-burning power stations. When disposal of the fuel ash is by means of settlement lagoons, cenospheres collect on the surface and are known as “floaters”. Their shell thickness is about 5% of the diameter.

Floater deposits on fly ash lagoons can create difficult environmental problems which DIRK is equipped to resolve by converting “floaters” into cenospheres.

DIRK has harvested cenospheres from fly ash lagoons worldwide; providing a service to the power generating industry whilst producing a high performance filler.

Cenospheres are an excellent replacement for other fillers such as glass spheres, calcium carbonate, clays, talc and other silica.

Due to their light weight nature (0.50 tons/m3) and perfectly spherical shape they act as excellent filler material. This becomes particularly important when the application needs weight reduction and superior viscocity.

The numerous applications include the use in radar screening paints to car mouldings. In fact, in most of the cases, the user does not disclose  details of his application – as lot of R&D goes into developing them.

Below:

Silver coated cenospheres for military application:

Cenosphere source will influence the eventual product properties including chemical composition, colour, particle size distribution, and particle density distribution. Processing will generally eliminate any important differences so that products are remarkable consistent.