The Structure of Silicate Anions in Aqueous Alkaline Solutions

摘要

Although aqueous silicates rank among the world's major chemical commodities-they are fundamental to applications as diverse as coatings,detergents,paper manufacturing,and water treatment-relatively few of the polyanions that they contain have been identified.Unmasking the structure of aqueous silicates is crucial to the debate over whether or not zeolite molecular sieves grow from solution by addition of prefabricated molecular building blocks("precursor species").Direct evidence of oligomeric silicate structures was initially obtained from analysis of their trimethylsilyl-substituted derivatives.