High chloride content calcium silicate glasses.

Chloride is known to volatilize from silicate glass melts and until now, only a limited number of studies on oxychloride silicate glasses have been reported. In this paper we have synthesized silicate glasses that retain large amounts of CaCl2 . The CaCl2 has been added to the calcium metasilicate composition (CaO·SiO2 ). Glasses were produced via a melt quench route and an average of 70% of the chloride was retained after melting. Up to 31.6 mol% CaCl2 has been successfully incorporated into these silicate glasses without the occurrence of crystallization.29 Si MAS-NMR spectra showed the silicon being present mainly as a Q2 silicate species. This suggests that chloride formed Cl-Ca(n) species, rather than Si-Cl bonds. Upon increasing the CaCl2 content, the Tg reduced markedly from 782 °C to 370 °C. Glass density and glass crystallization temperature decreased linearly with an increase in the CaCl2 content. However, both linear regressions revealed a breakpoint at a CaCl2 content just below 20 mol%. This might be attributed to a significant change in the structure and is also correlated with the nature of the crystallizing phases formed upon heat treatment. The glasses with less than 19.2 mol% CaCl2 crystallized to wollastonite, whilst the compositions with CaCl2 content equal to or greater than 19.2 mol% are thought to crystallize to CaCl2 . In practice, the crystallization of CaCl2 could not occur until the crystallization temperature fell below the melting point of CaCl2 . The implications of the results along with the high chloride retention are discussed.