Process for producing inorganic microspheres and glass microballoons

摘要

A process for producing inorganic microspheres (solid spheres or hollow spheres), which comprises pulverizing a material by wet pulverization to an average particle size of at most 5 mu m to obtain a slurry of a pulverized powder material, spraying the slurry to form liquid droplets, and heating the liquid droplets to fuse or sinter the powder material to obtain inorganic microspheres. Also disclosed are glass microballons of apparent density 0.1 to 1.5g/cm<3> and average particle size in the range of 1 to 20 mu m wherein ≽80% of the particles are of size 1 to 50 mu m.