Chalcogenide glasses for infrared optics: A new method of elaboration

摘要

Chalcogenide glasses based on selenium are since twenty years considered as a way to replace single-crystalline Germanium often used as lenses for thermal imaging devices. While they should be costless because of the lowest proportion of germanium, their way of synthesis combining high temperature and silica tubes maintain a high cost. In this paper, an alternative method to prepare chalcogenide glasses by using a combination of mechanical milling and spark plasma sintering is presented. The structure of amorphous powder obtained after several tens of hours of mechanical milling was compared using NMR and Raman to the structure of glass made using the conventional melt-quench technique, both presents identical thermo-mechanical properties and structure. Moreover, the effect of various contaminations during milling and sintering on the final transparency is put forward.