Growth, Morphology and Solid State Miscibility of Alkali Nitrates

Abstract

This PhD thesis is focused in structural aspects of alkali nitrates. In the first chapter, we recollected the most important advancement in this field in alkali nitrates compounds published since 1970. Along this lines, crystal structure, polymorphism and phase transition is discussed first; second, crystal growth, and third, the morphology. And, finally a section concerning solid state miscibility and binary phase diagrams between these compounds is presented. The following chapters present a deeper study of growth morphology and how the impurities affect to the morphology and growth rate. These two topics are closely related because the growth morphology is a consequence of the growth rate ratio of different faces. Evidently, we chose only one compound of all the alkali nitrate family. It turned to be sodium nitrate, nitratine or NaNO3. First, in chapter 2, we calculate the morphology of nitratine by applying the two most common approaches to determine the theoretic morphology of crystals: the Bravais-Friedel-Donnay-Harker (BFDH) methodology and the periodic bond chains (PBCs) procedure proposed by Hartman and Perdok (HP). Then we compare the obtained morphology with the experimental growth shape. This compound is interesting from the morphological and structural point of view because it is isostructural with calcite, a calcium carbonate (CaCO3) polymorph. This fact will permit us to discuss how the charges affect the final crystal morphology; an introduction to this question is in chapter 2. In chapter 3 we sought to determination of the normal growth rates (R104) of {104} faces of sodium nitrate single crystals under isothermal conditions in the temperature interval 288 K  297.5 K and hence find the most probable growth mechanisms. Chapter 4 is devoted to the morphology change in NaNO3 crystals by the effect of impurities. It is followed by an atomic force microscopy (AFM) investigation of heterogeneous nucleation of nitratine on calcite in chapter 5. Finally, the NaNO3 – KNO3 phase diagram has been studied from both experimental and theoretical aspects in chapter 6.