Boron trioxide

Boron trioxide or diboron trioxide is the oxide of boron with the formula . It is a colorless transparent solid, almost always glassy (amorphous), which can be crystallized only with great difficulty. It is also called boric oxide or boria. It has many important industrial applications, chiefly in ceramics as a flux for glazes and enamels and in the production of glasses. Boron trioxide has three known forms, one amorphous and two crystalline. The amorphous form (g-) is by far the most common. It is thought to be composed of boroxol rings which are six-membered rings composed of alternating 3-coordinate boron and 2-coordinate oxygen. Because of the difficulty of building disordered models at the correct density with many boroxol rings, this view was initially controversial, but such models have recently been constructed and exhibit properties in excellent agreement with experiment. It is now recognized, from experimental and theoretical studies, that the fraction of boron atoms belonging to boroxol rings in glassy is somewhere between 0.73 and 0.83, with 0.75 = 3/4 corresponding to a 1:1 ratio between ring and non-ring units. The number of boroxol rings decays in the liquid state with increasing temperature. The crystalline form (α-) is exclusively composed of BO3 triangles. It crystal structure was initially believed to be the enantiomorphic space groups P31(#144) and P32(#145), like γ-glycine; but was later revised to the enantiomorphic space groups P3121(#152) and P3221(#154) in the trigonal crystal system, like α-quartz Crystallization of α- from the molten state at ambient pressure is strongly kinetically disfavored (compare liquid and crystal densities). It can be obtained with prologed annealing of the amorphous solid ~200°C under at least 10 kbar of pressure. The trigonal network undergoes a coesite-like transformation to monoclinic β- at several gigapascals (9.5 GPa). Boron trioxide is produced by treating borax with sulfuric acid in a fusion furnace. At temperatures above 750°C, the molten boron oxide layer separates out from sodium sulfate.