Preparation and characterization of glass-ceramics with granite tailings and titanium-bearing blast furnace slags

•Building glass-ceramics adopt 100 wt% solid wastes were prepared.•Adopt TiO2 contained in titanium-bearing blast furnace slags as nucleating agents directly.•Main crystallite phases of glass-ceramics prepared are diopside and wollastonite.•Microhardness of glass-ceramics is higher than 8.6 GPa with the content of granite tailings lower than 40 wt%. The resource utilization of granite tailings and titanium-bearing blast furnace slags is an emphasis of current research and is widely considered. In this work, by adopting these two slags as raw materials, diopside-based glass-ceramics were synthesized by melting-cooling-monolithic crystallization. The influence of the content of granite tailings, namely, the ratio of (SiO2+Al2O3/CaO+TiO2) on the structure and properties of glass-ceramics was characterized with differential scanning calorimetry, X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscope, volume density and microhardness. The results suggest that the introduction of granite tailings makes the melting quality of glass deteriorate and the crystallization tendency decrease, the number of microcrystalline in glass-ceramics decreases and the glass phase increases. Moreover, the increase of Si/O ratio is advantageous to the precipitation of wollastonite but not diopside, and the volume density and microhardness of glass-ceramics decrease with the increase of granite tailings. When the content of granite tailings is 40 wt%, the crystal structure of glass-ceramics is moderate, the volume density and microhardness are 3.0207 g/cm3 and 8.6 GPa, respectively, which are excellent for architectural decoration.