Study of nanoconfigurations in Zircon-Mullite composites using perturbed angular correlations

It has been already published that, at nanoscopic level, zircon exhibits wide regions of aperiodic material not detected by the ordinary techniques used to analyse the obtained product in the production of ceramic materials. In this paper it is reported how the Perturbed Angular Correlations (PAC) technique has assisted the interpretation of a mismatch between experiment and theoretical estimation of a mechanical property in some zircon-mullite composites. In fact, it has been proved that the difference observed between the calculated and the experimental value of the elastic modulus in composites of the form (1−x) ZrSiO 4 − x 3Al 2 O 3 .2SiO 2 (with x = 15, 25, 35 and 45 wt.%) behaves very similarly as the relative amount of aperiodic zircon determined by PAC. This result allows to re-interpret the mullite role during the materials preparation.