The Structure of Zinc Polyphosphate Glasses

B. C. Sales1, J. U. Otaigbe2, G. H. Beall3, L. A. Boatner2,and J. O. Ramey2

1Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6056, U.S.A.

2Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011

3Science and Technology Group, Corning, Inc., Corning, NY 14831

Abstract

The technique of high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) has been used to determine the distributions of phosphate-anion chains and rings in a variety of zinc-phosphate-based glasses. The phosphate-anion distributions in simple binary zinc phosphate glasses are compared to those found in multi-cation alkali-zinc phosphate glasses. Multi-cation zinc phosphate glasses are chemically durable and can be tailored to exhibit transition temperatures sufficiently low for co-processing with a variety of plastics to form novel organic-inorganic composite materials. The intermediate range order in the multi-cation glasses is found to be similar to that measured in the binary zinc-phosphate glasses. Scanning calorimetry measurements indicate, however, that the multi-cation glasses are more resistant to crystallization than the binary glasses. The fraction of phosphorus sites with 2 (Q2), 1 (Q1) and 0 (Q0) bridging oxygen, as well as the ratio of bridging to non-bridging oxygen (BO/NBO), are obtained from the chromatograms. Structural data for the zinc phosphate glasses obtained using HPLC are compared to results reported in the literature that were deduced using more-traditional solid-state techniques such as NMR, XPS, and Raman spectroscopy.