Structural and Physical Properties of Fe2O3-B2O3-V2O5 Glasses

The structural and physical properties of xFe(2)O(3)-(40- x) B2O3-60V(2)O(5) (0 <= x <= 20) glass system have been investigated. The samples were prepared by normal melt-quench technique. The structural changes were inferred by means of FTIR by monitoring the infrared (IR) spectra in the spectral range 600-4000 cm (1). The absence of boroxol ring (806 cm (1)) in the present glass system suggested that these glasses consist of randomly connected BO3 and BO4 units. The conversion of BO3 to BO4 and VO5 to VO4 tetrahedra along with the formation of non-bridging oxygen's (NBOs) attached to boron and vanadium takes place in the glasses under investigation. The density and molar volume of the present glass system were found to depend on Fe2O3 content. DC conductivity of the glass system has been determined in the temperature range 310-500 K. It was found that the general behavior of electrical conductivity was similar for all glass compositions and found to increase with increasing iron content. The parameters such as activation energy, average separation between transition metal ions (TMIs), polaron radius, and so forth have been calculated in adiabatic region and are found consistent with Mott's model of phonon-assisted polaronic hopping. Copyright (C) 2008 Virender Kundu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.