Structural Aspects of Several Oxide Glasses as Elucidated by Multinuclear NMR.

NMR is sensitive to many interactions that the nucleus experiences with its environment. Included among these interactions are two that were heavily exploited in this thesis. They are the electric quadrupole interaction and the chemical shift interaction. These interactions yield structural information on short-range order and atom coordinations, which are very valuable and important to the understanding of properties and microstructures of glasses. Both the static or MASS NMR at high field and low field CW NMR were utilized to obtain information concerning the coordinations and local environments of several oxide glasses. For some systems, other spectroscopic methods (thermal analysis, X-ray and IR spectroscopies) were also used to assist NMR studies. In Chapter I relevant NMR theory and detection techniques used for this work are introduced. In Chapters 2-4, some structural aspects of alkali borate, borosilicate or alkali boroaluminate glasses are studied. In particular, boron coordinations in these glasses are carefully reinvestigated. The relationship between the change in boron coordinations and the changes in macroscopic characteristics of the glasses (such as electric conductivity and the mixed alkali effects) are studied. In mixed alkali glasses, the postulated alkali -pairing model provides a reasonable explanation for the structural changes. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the ^{71}Ga and ^{69 }Ga NMR studies of alkali gallate glasses. The glassforming range is explored and the gallium atom coordinations are studied. A structural model for the glass systems is suggested based on the distribution of galliums of different coordinations and structural parameters (quadrupole coupling constants, asymmetry parameters, and isotropic chemical shifts, etc.). A study of ^{31} P spectra in lead-iron-phosphate nuclear waste glasses is presented in Chapter 6. By subjecting the samples to various magnetic field strengths and different temperatures, information on the local phosphorus networks is obtained.