Modeling Surface Area to Volume Effects on Borosilicate Glass Dissolution

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Abstract
We simulated the reaction of SRL-131 glass with equilibrated J-13 water in order to investigate the effects of surface area to volume ratio (SAN/) on glass dissolution. We show that glass-fluid ion exchange causes solution pH to rise to progressively higher values as SA/V increases. Because the ion exchange is rapid relative to the duration of the glass dissolution experiment, the pH effect does not scale with (SA/V)*time. Experiments compared at the same (SA/V)*time value therefore have different pHs, with higher pHs at higher SA/V ratios. Both experimental data and our simulation results show similar trends of increasing reaction rate as a function of SAN ratio when scaled to (SA/V)*time. Glasses which react in systems of differing SA/V ratio therefore follow different reaction paths and high SAN ratios cannot be used to generate data which accurately scales to long time periods unless the ion exchange effect is taken into account. We suggest some simple test designs which enable more reliable high SAN accelerated tests.

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