Resumen en español

To promote the use of local raw materials (La Tetilla, Cauca) it is necessary to know more about their structural features and their response to certain treatments, including thermal treatments. In this work, a local raw material (La Tetilla, Cauca) was thermally treated and its behavior was studied with IR spectroscopy. Using a deconvolution band method and the integrated area concept to treat the results, we can describe the structural transformation of this clay that contained kaolin. The results of IR spectroscopy showed that the solid presented an important transformation between 500 y 700 °C. This process was determined because in this temperature range the integrated area of the bands associated to kaolin (~3629 and ~3695 cm-1), and to Al-OH (~910 cm-1) and Si-O-Al (~532 cm-1) decreased. On the other hand, in this range the surface OH (~3465 cm-1) and S i-O-Si bonds (~470 cm-1) increased.