Resumen en español

Clays are the main raw material in the manufacture of products for the construction sector, such as tile, veneer, flooring and bricks. Small and medium enterprises generally use brick clays of different mineralogical origin, classified in order to formulate their mixtures according to the production team experience; the uncertainty associated with this method causes that a portion of their manufactured products are rejected, because their properties do not meet the technical specifications. This paper presents a methodology based on neural networks for classification of clays, based on the clay properties to be used to make the pasta, with the aim of reducing the number of rejected products. It used different network topologies for classification, and chose the one which have been found capable to predict the training and testing samples with an accuracy of 97.79 % and 94.12 %, respectively.