Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2019

College/Unit

Statler College of Engineering and Mining Resources

Department/Program/Center

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Abstract

Silica is the most abundant component on the earth’s surface. It plays an important role in many natural processes. Silica is also a critical material for a wide range of technical applications such as in optics and electronics. In this work, we discuss our recent experimental observation of the unusual amber coloration of aluminum doped sol-gel glass that has not been reported in the past. We characterized Al-doped sol-gel glasses, prepared at different sintering temperature, using a plethora of techniques to investigate the origin of this unusual coloration and to understand their structural and chemical properties. We used these experimental results to test a number of possible coloring mechanisms. The results suggested this coloring is likely caused by temperature-dependent aluminum-associated defect centers associated with different amorphous-to-crystalline ratios of the annealed sol-gel silica glass structures.

Source Citation

Chang, A., He, Y., Arango, M. A. T., Wang, M., Ren, Y., Feng, Z., Chang, C.-H., & Sierros, K. A. (2019). On the unusual amber coloration of nanoporous sol-gel processed Al-doped silica glass: An experimental study. Scientific Reports, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-48917-4

Comments

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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