INVESTIGATIONS OF THE ACID BASE CHEMISTRY OF TECHNOLOGICALLY IMPORTANT MOLTEN SALTS AND GLASSES.

Understanding the acid-base chemistry of molten oxides, metallurgical slags, and glasses is necessary in developing and advancing these technologically important materials. In search of this understanding, correlations have been found to exist between the chemical properties of related model oxide systems and the ultraviolet absorption spectra. This paper addresses the question of how closely the optical basicity correlates with the known thermodynamic basicity (e. g. , alkali chloride activity) of well studied chloroaluminate molten salts. In this study, the relationship between alkali chloride activity and optical basicity is stringently tested through an equivalence point where the thermodynamics are known to change many orders of magnitude in the small composition region near the stoichiometry.