13 th Romanian International Conference on Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Inorganic materials – Building up new properties R. Isopescu, M. Calogrea, L. Filipescu a Faculty of Industrial Chemistry, “Politehnica” University of Bucharest, ROMANIA Keywords: silicate, builder, fertilizer, phase transition and stabilization, prill, granules Abstract A new tendency in inorganic materials field was shortly reviewed focusing on the properties to be attached to old materials in order to fulfil various market demands. Introduction During the last decades, the chemists have been challenged by high demands and expertise in the field of inorganic materials and technologies. The entire pertinent advances and investments were rewarded by the new-recorded properties and transfer technology. Recently, the natural stream in the field was refocused to properties themselves rather then to material composition and purity. This paper discloses the results of researches to find ways to add new required properties to old materials in order to keep up with market demands. I. SODIUM DISILICATE Amorphous and layered crystalline sodium disilicate (SD) gained a special place in the last decade developments of the multiple function builders for detergent industry, mainly for their environmental friendship. Any kind of builder should exhibit some very specific properties: a) buffering capacity, high binding capacity for calcium and magnesium ions, dissolution in two stages from which the first has to be slow, instant particle disintegration in hard waters etc. Amorphous and crystalline SD accomplish almost completely their tasks, but the acting mechanism and washing quality is not the same for both polymorphs: Mechanism A → unlayered polymorph → particle disintegration → partial dissolution and action→ total dissolution → soluble and insoluble entities in flote→ionic washing [1]. Mechanism B → layered polymorph → particle disintegration → ionic exchange and action→ total dissolution→ micelle entities in flote → micelle washing [2]. The above mechanisms suggest that the only way to tie up valuable properties to SD as a builder is to increase the percentage of layered polymorphs in industial product. This paper gathers all the researches concerning the layered beta-SD and delta-SD crystallization from additivated and non-additivated amorphous. Experimental data grant a multistage