Estudo de vidros metasilicatos de chumbo puro e dopado produzidos via fusão laser

Abstract

For thousand years, vitreous materials have been studied and improved due to its wide range of applications, from the simplest ones like windows and glass cups, to the most advanced ones such as medicine, telecommunications, radiation detectors, among others. The lead silicate glasses, object of study in this work, are well known for their optical applications and its high refractive index due to lead presence. In addition, lead is known to be a heavy metal widely used for high energy radiation protection. In the present work, the production, structural and optical properties of the pure and doped lead silicate glass with europium (Eu) were studied on the PbO-SiO2 system, where the lead was partially substituted by europium. Usually the production of glasses is performed using a furnace for material melting, however in this work is proposed a new glasses production process that has been giving satisfactory results is using a CO2 laser for material melting. It has presented some advantages, such as fast processing speed, very high heating and cooling rates and possibility of producing materials with high melting point. For the production and characterization of glasses, some techniques were used, such as Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC), Raman Spectroscopy, X-ray Diffractometry (XRD), UV-Vis Spectroscopy and Photoluminescence. In this work, an efficient routine to glasses production using a CO2 laser as heating source was achieved and the glass optical characterization was performed. Absorbance, gap energy and luminescent emission of the produced glasses were determined.