About Materials: What is Sintered Stone?

If you are looking for stone for your dining tabletops, coffee tabletops, worktops, or something else, it’s normal that you will consider the natural stone (quartz, marble, etc.) as your first and only option. However, there is a new high-tech material becoming the favorite of designers and homeowners for its versatility, beauty, practicality, and affordability, which can be another option available to you.

Sintered stones are manufactured by advanced technology, sintering, which mimics the process of natural stone formation. Sintering is a process that bonds materials together without dissolving them by extremely high temperatures (up to 1,200ºC) and pressure (up to 400 bars) making the final product stronger than the individual parts.

Technically, natural stone (quartz, marble, etc.) is a natural version of sintered stone. However, these natural stones are a random combination of minerals, while the sintered stones are made of carefully selected materials for quality, color, and texture, which endows sintered stones with lower porosity and high hardness.

 As a new material, sintered stone has eight advantages compared with traditional materials:

1. Safety and Health: Made of natural minerals and processed by new technology, the antibacterial rate of sintered stone is up to 99%, assuring that it can contact directly with food.
2. High-Temperature Resistance: It will not deform even come into direct contact with high-temperature objects. A1 fire-proof level prevents it from any physical changes (shrinkage, rupture, discoloration) even encountering 2000℃ fire, nor it will emit any harmful gas or smelly odor.
3. Stain Resistance: Sintered stone set a new bar for other artificial materials with its 0.01% water penetration rate, which gives no space for bacteria to breed or stains to infiltrate.
4. Scratch Resistance: The hardest material in daily life is diamond whose Mohs Hardness Scale (MHS) is 10. The MHS of sintered stone is 6-7 while that of steel is only 5.5, which makes sintered stone scratch-resistant for it is difficult for normal knives to leave any slashes on it.
5. Corrosion Resistance: The optimal raw material of sintered stone decide that it is resistant to various chemicals, including organic solvents, inorganic solvents, disinfectants, and detergents.
6. Easy to Clean: It can be cleaned just with a wet towel, without the need of any special maintenance.
7. Excellent Impermeability: The best tiles nowadays have a permeability rate of 0.3%, while that of sintered stone is as low as 0.02%.
8. VariousStyles: Sintered stone is a chameleon that can imitate the texture and color of other materials, including but not limited to marble, volcanic rock, cloth, and wood.