Resource, characteristic, purification and application of quartz: a review

Abstract

As a mineral resource, due to its stable physical chemistry properties, quartz has a wide range of uses, such as silica glass, silica ceramics, silicon metal in the semiconductor field, solar cells in the photovoltaic field, silica fiber in the fiber-optic communication field, and so on. These applications have the participation of high-purity quartz. The purification of high-purity quartz is an important field for quartz. However, it is very difficult to further purify quartz into high-purity quartz, or even ultra-high-purity quartz, which the cost will increase accordingly. Nevertheless, high-purity quartz in the field of high-tech applications is more prominent, its value will be greatly enhanced. In this review, by introducing the resources and application distribution of high purity quartz, and comparing with the import and export in the world, it is concluded that quartz has a good future for development; by introducing the types of quartz ores and the characteristics of impurities and combining with the most advanced purification technology at present, a reference is provided for the following improvement of purification technology. In addition, the mechanisms are summarized for different purification techniques to explore the more effective techniques for quartz purification and its potential application prospects are described in the future. In this paper, in order to know the present situation and development prospect of resources, technology and application in quartz, its resource, characteristic, purification, and application are reviewed.