The Glaze Formulator

Welcome to the Glaze Formulator! This application will take a target unity molecular formula together with a list of materials to use, and it will produce a glaze recipe that approximates the target unity formula as closely as possible. Enter your desired target formula in the boxes under Unity Formula (there is a simple example formula to start from), then choose the materials you want using the box under Materials (you can type to search). Alternatively, you can upload a GlazeChem file to set the targets and the materials. You can export a GlazeChem file from Glazy. Your recipe will appear under Recipe, and its unity formula will appear under Actual. Large discrepancies between the Target unity formula and the Actual unity formula will be marked with a coloured box. You can approximate the example unity formula pretty well with EP Kaolin, Silica, Frit 3134, Neph Sy, and Whiting. Give it a try.

For advanced users: Sometimes, a perfect approximation is not possible with a given collection of materials. In that case, a compromise must be made. For example, if you try to approximate the example formula using Frit 3195 instead of 3134, the sodium will be a little low. However, you can tell the program to try harder to match the sodium value at the expense of other oxides by adjusting its Influence. If you turn up the influence for sodium (move slider to the right) you will see your recipe change, you will see that the sodium value matches better, but the potassium will become higher than the target. If you move the slider to the left, that oxide will be less important. Move it all the way to the left and that oxide will be ignored when determining the recipe. The sliders let you determine which target values are most important to you and which ones don't matter. You can also click the checkbox marked K Na if you want the optimizer to ignore the distinction between those two oxides. If the box is checked, the optimizer will try to ensure that the sum of the oxides in the recipe UMF matches the sum of the targets for those oxides.

Multiple recipes: for some settings, multiple different recipes may be found that have the same UMF. In this case, all recipes will be displayed. Any blend of these recipes will also have the same UMF.