Gel Growth of Strontium and Zinc Tartrate Crystals

For the formation of crystals, it is important to understand the theories of crystal growth. The gel method can be used at room temperature or at low temperature conveniently. For those substances having very slight solubility in water and the crystal of which cannot be satisfactorily grown from melt or vapor, it gives reasonable prospects of success. The low solubility and lower dissociation temperatures of the tartrate compounds impose several constraints in adopting solution technique. But the gel method stands out as an efficient technique for growth of tartrate crystals. Tartrate crystals grown by gel method have potential applications in piezoelectric devices, medical equipments, fiber optics, and NLO field. In present work, the good quality, uniformly well developed crystals are grown by gel method for different conditions under optimized preparative parameters, such as concentration of supernatant, pH of solution, density, aging of gel, temperature etc. The grown crystal are characterized by using Scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD),Thermal analysis, FT-IR, EDAX, Electrical conductivity and UV-VIS Spectroscopy.