Patent 7278330 was granted and assigned to NGK Insulators on October, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
There is disclosed a method of inspecting a porous structure, capable of simply inspecting pore characteristics (porosity, average pore diameter, total pore volume) of the porous structure by inspection of a weight of a formed article which was formed, dried and worked into a predetermined dimension without requiring any special device or technique, and capable of easily performing a total inspection. A relation between a pore characteristics of a fired article obtained by firing a formed/dried formed article having a predetermined shape, and a weight of the formed article is measured beforehand, and a standard value of the pore characteristics of the fired article, and a standard value of the weight of the formed article are established. Thereafter, the pore characteristics of the fired article are inspected from the weight of the formed article based on the respective standard values.