High-purity quartz, also known as high-purity quartz sand, is a general term for a series of quartz sand products with a silicon dioxide purity greater than 99.9% (3N). Its essence is a quartz crystal raw material. It is obtained from natural quartz ore through purification and processing. It has extremely high silicon dioxide purity and a certain particle size.
High-purity quartz characteristics 1: Purity
The first characteristic of high-purity quartz products, that is, the most significant characteristic, is their high SiO2 purity. In fact, the industrial application of quartz is closely related to the purity of SiO2.
High-purity quartz characteristics 2: Particle size
The second important characteristic of high-purity quartz products is their particle size requirements, that is, the processed product is sand, which is a product with a certain particle size.
As an important indicator of high-purity quartz, particle size generally ranges from 40 to 150 meshes, and the specific particle size should be determined according to industrial applications. The main product of high-purity quartz is not “ultrafine powder”, let alone “nano” particles. Even if it is used to process various ultrafine silicon micropowder raw materials including spherical silicon micropowder, it is first purified and processed into quartz sand with a certain particle size, and then ultrafine crushing and classification processing are carried out.
High-purity quartz characteristics 3: Physical phase
The third important characteristic of high-purity quartz products is that their physical phase is crystalline phase, that is, they are all quartz single mineral crystals with very high crystallinity. In view of the difficulty in manufacturing high-end products of high-purity quartz (SiO2 purity greater than 4N8), some people have proposed a technical route of using synthetic methods to prepare amorphous SiO2 powder as a substitute.
Although the higher purity quartz glass prepared by artificial synthesis is suitable for optical fiber manufacturing, it not only has no price advantage in other industrial application fields such as quartz crucibles, but also because of the use of SiCl4 as raw material and hydrogen as fuel, impurities such as hydroxyl will be produced in the preparation process, which limits its application in some fields.
In terms of particle size characteristics, phase characteristics and use efficiency, artificially synthesized amorphous SiO2 powder and quartz glass are not high-purity quartz.