Structure and redox ratio of soda‐lime‐silica glasses with high iron oxide concentrations

Abstract

AbstractThe high temperature synthesis of glasses in the system (100‐x)(0.16Na2O/0.10CaO/0.74SiO2)/xFe2O3, x = 5 ÷ 20 mol% is reported. For Fe2O3 concentrations ≤15 mol%, glasses are formed while the sample with 20 mol% crystallizes during cooling the melt. X‐ray diffraction shows the crystallization of magnetite. The microstructure of the glass‐crystalline sample is investigated by optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy and two types of iron‐rich crystals corresponding to magnetite and hematite are detected. The refractive indices as determined by the Becke line method are in the 1.567 ‐ 1.639 range and. increase with increasing Fe2O3 concentration. The structure is characterized using Infra‐red spectroscopy. The presence of symmetric stretching, asymmetric stretching and bending vibrations of Si‐O‐Si is detected and attributed to the occurrence of SiO4 tetrahedral units with varying numbers of nonbridging oxygens. Also, the increasing Fe2O3 concentration results in occurrence of Fe‐O‐Si bonds indicating the glass network depolymerization due to Fe2O3 addition. In all samples, the presence of Fe3+ and Fe2+ and the existence of iron ions in tetrahedral and octahedral coordination, as well as a very small amount of Fe0 and the precipitation of hematite and magnetite in the glass‐crystalline sample is revealed by Mössbauer spectroscopy.