Coralie Weigel

Vitreous silica distends in helium gas: acoustic versus static compressibilities.

Sound velocities of vitreous silica are measured under He compression in the pressure range of 0-6 GPa by Brillouin light scattering. It is found that the well-known anomalous maximum in the pressure dependence of the compressibility is suppressed by He incorporation into the silica network. This shows that the elastic anomaly relates to the collapse of the largest interstitial voids in the structure. The huge difference between the static and the acoustic compressibilities indicates that the amount of incorporated helium still increases at 6 GPa.

Poroelastic theory applied to the adsorption-induced deformation of vitreous silica.

When vitreous silica is submitted to high pressures under a helium atmosphere, the change in volume observed is much smaller than expected from its elastic properties. It results from helium penetration into the interstitial free volume of the glass network. We present here the results of concurrent spectroscopic experiments using either helium or neon and molecular simulations relating the amount of gas adsorbed to the strain of the network. We show that a generalized poromechanical approach, describing the elastic properties of microporous materials upon adsorption, can be applied successfully to silica glass in which the free volume exists only at the subnanometer scale. In that picture, the adsorption-induced deformation accounts for the small apparent compressibility of silica observed in experiments.