Pottery in Australia Vol 17 No 1 Autumn 1978

with a umt In which less than I % of the total fuel input is being used for the
actual job for which it was intended.
It is now nearly a decade since we first checked out these calculations, and
it appeared glaringly obvious that one of the major disadvantages of a brick kiln
of this general capacity was that while both kiln and contents required to be
heated, in effect 15 times more heat was being absorbed by the structure, or
deadload, than was being absorbed by the payload.
The solution was quite simple-get rid of the deadload. Theoretically, if
you bring the dead load down to, say, 3001bs, you are heating up only one-tenth
of the structure that you were heating previously.
Let us just look again at the figures for a conventional kiln .... Total heat
absorbed = 351bs gas (33 Ibs kiln and 2lbs ware) . With 25% efficiency this is
equivalent to 140 Ibs gas total.
Now for a super light-weight kiln .... Total heat absorbed = 5.3 lbs gas
(3.3Ibs kiln and 21bs ware). Again, with 25 % efficiency, this is equivalent to
22 Ibs gas. Of course, ten years ago, such a proposal was quite preposterous. The
mathematics were quite straightforward-perhaps too straightforward-and they
were only figures. Nowhere in the world had it been done.
The prototype models showed immediately that the fuel savings anticipate