zone melting

zone melting, any of a group of techniques used to purify an element or a compound or control its composition by melting a short region (i.e., zone) and causing this liquid zone to travel slowly through a relatively long ingot, or charge, of the solid. As the zone travels, it redistributes impurities along the charge. The final distribution of the impurity depends on its distribution in the starting charge of material; its distribution between the liquid and solid phase of the material (called its distribution coefficient, k, which is a characteristic of the particular impurity); and on the size, number, and travel direction of the zones.

Zone melting is a means of using the freezing process to manipulate impurities. It combines the fact that a freezing crystal differs in composition from the liquid from which it crystallizes with the idea of passing a short liquid zone along a lengthy solid.

Zone refining is the most important of the zone-melting techniques. In zone refining, a solid is refined by passing a number of molten zones through it in one direction. Each zone carries a fraction of the impurities to the end of the solid charge, thereby purifying the remainder. Zone refining was first described by the U.S. scientist W.G. Pfann and was first used in the early 1950s to purify germanium for transistors. The purity achieved was hitherto unheard of—less than one part of detectable impurity in 10,000,000,000 parts of germanium. The method was adopted in transistor manufacture around the world.

The principles of zone refining are quite general, and so the method has been applied to many substances. More than one-third of the elements and hundreds of inorganic and organic compounds have been raised to their highest purity by zone refining. Many of these were, for the first time, made pure enough for their intrinsic properties to be determined.

Principles of zone refining.

When a cylinder of a substance A containing an impurity B is melted and then slowly frozen from one end to the other, as in Figure 1A, the impurity is usually concentrated in the last-to-freeze region of the cylinder. This procedure is normal freezing. Component B is redistributed in this example because the atoms (or molecules) of B at the liquid-solid interface prefer the liquid phase to the solid phase. A measure of this preference is the distribution coefficient, k, defined as the ratio of the concentration of B in the just-forming solid A to that in liquid A. At very slow freezing rates an equilibrium exists; the distribution coefficient under these equilibrium conditions is termed k₀. At moderate freezing rates, about 1 to 30 centimetres per hour (0.4 to 12 inches per hour), the effective distribution coefficient, k, will lie somewhere between k₀ and unity. This is because, for k less than unity, the rejected impurity B accumulates in the liquid just ahead of the advancing solid, so that the just-forming solid “sees” a liquid more impure than the bulk liquid. If freezing is rapid enough, k₀ may approach unity; that is, the impurity concentration would be the same in the liquid and solid phases. Under these conditions, there would be no zone refining, and the interface probably would become dendritic or branching in shape.

The normal freezing operation is the basis of the long-known technique of repeated fractional crystallizations. Although this technique was employed by the Curies to isolate radium it never became widely used because it entailed a lengthy and troublesome sequence of operations: partial freezing, separation of the crystals from the unfrozen liquid, remelting, and recombining with other fractions.

Zone refining achieves the same result very simply. A series of molten zones traverse the ingot in the same direction, usually through a series of heaters, as suggested in Figure 1B. Each zone takes in impurity at its melting interface and freezes out solid purer than the liquid at its freezing interface. There is no need to separate and recombine fractions, or even to touch or move the charge at all.

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The distribution of impurity B after successive zone passes for an ingot 10 zones long and for a distribution coefficient k equal to 0.5 (a value neither especially favourable nor especially unfavourable) is shown in Figure 2.

As more zone passes are made the impurity concentration at the beginning of the ingot drops lower and lower until it eventually reaches a limit called the ultimate distribution. The lowest concentration of impurity B is extremely small, less than 0.0001.