The district of the Campos dos Goytacazes, RJ, Brazil, has a ceramic pole with more than 100 ceramic industries, with a 90 million monthly production (brick masonry, ceramic blocks and tiles). Due to failure in the productive industrial process, some of these materials have been generating wastes that produce environmental impacts. This work proposes the incorporation of the ceramic waste in mortars to evaluate the representative proportions through the lattice simplex experiments design, looking for technical solutions, without the industrial empiricism. These solutions could reach a satisfactory performance of the analyzed property, of the water retention capacity, and favor the sustainable development. The experimental procedure was based on standard test methods (ABNT 13276, 13277 e 13281). Starting from these lab tests, ten experimental points were taken with maximum content of cement, sand and ceramic waste 20, 80 and 20% mass, respectively, that delimited the surface response for the mortars with a consistence index around 265±30 mm. This index means the real application for the statistical model, being however higher than the normalized value. The special cubic simplex model showed to best fit the experimental results leading to more statistically appropriate responses for the mixtures. The response surface generated showed a water retention capacity in mortar varying from 88 to 94.5%, that could be classified as normal and high according to ABNT 13281. Even with the higher values than the standard consistence index (established value by the standard method), it was possible to obtain a standardized water retention capacity with the addition of ceramic waste into the mortar.
mortar; ceramic waste; experimental design; simplex lattice
