An economic solution to high quality travertine filling

Travertine is a natural stone with carbonate origin which has a high porosity. The percentage of porosity changes from 12 to 60. Some travertines have holes crossing the entire thickness of travertine. The travertine slabs gets weaker and easily break with increasing porosity. Therefore these pores must be filled otherwise the travertine slabs can easily be broken, if they contain large percentage of porosity. The other advantages of filled travertines are increased durability and anti bacterial property. The cement based travertine filling is more common and more economic filling process than resin and polyester filling. But in the cement based filling shrinkage can happen during the hardening period and micro cracks can be formed. The other disadvantages are the lower workability, slow setting time. In the research study various chemical additives are used to solve these problems. Also the cost of filling material is kept to minimum by using the right quantities of ingredients. Unfilled travertine tile samples of three biggest travertines exporting companies are brought and filled manually. Two head polishing machine is used in polishing travertine tiles of 30.5 × 30.5 × 1 cm in dimension. Color chart is made from travertine samples. The color variation on travertine samples is measured with SP64 Portable Sphere Spectrophotometer. The roughness of filled travertine plates is measured. The filling material formulations which gave the best performance are determined also the formulation material costs are analyzed and the most economical formulations are determined. A questionnaire together with a 5 kg sample are send to companies to determine their satisfaction with the mixture formulation. The companies replied that the filling results were satisfactory.