Hi all,
I've been trying unsuccessfully to determine the proportion of fused silica fibers (pure amorphous silica) within a matrix of glass fibers (silica glass containing various minor oxides : Ba, Na, K and Al mainly).
This can be done if you know your raw materials (for instance, via ICP determination of one of the minor elements in glass if you know its concentration in the raw material).
But, if you don't know the sample (competitive product, unknown source...), I'm stuck, glass not being my best-known material.
Tried the following :
- SEM-EDX on Ba or Na : the fibers are micro-fibers and the interaction volume is too large to contrast all of them, so that I'm lacking lots of glass fibers in an elemental map and I cannot envisage stereology
- XRD : everything's amorphous, no luck
- fusion : tried various temperature strategies, with or without flux (avoid eutectics as tehy melt quartz along glass) and although I manage to preferrably melt glass, it sticks to quartz and I cannot fully dissolve it or separate it
I'm at my wit's end here. Any idea from someone more versed into silica/glass/amorphous quartz materials ?
Kind regards
Did you try Raman spectroscopy to map a wavelength associated with a given polymerization degree of SiO2 tetrahedrons? Amorphous silica polymerization should be quite high and the one of glass lower depending on the content of network modifiers.
Thanks for the suggestion Simon. No, I did not try out Raman yet : don't have easy access to a Raman imager unfortunately but I will ask around to try and test this.
Hi
Yiu could try raman spepctra or XPS. In this the corresponding wave number vibration may indicate the proportion of tje target.
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