Modelling of viscosity of melts containing iron oxide in ternary silicate systems

The motivation of this work is to show that the structural model, which was initially used to estimate the thermodynamic properties of binary silicate systems, can be also used to estimate the viscosity of binary and ternary silicate melts in terms of temperature and composition. The model links the viscosity to the internal structure of melts through the concentration of the oxygen bridges present in the slag. A previously proposed structural thermodynamic model was used to calculate the content of oxygen bridges. The viscosity model requires only three parameters to obtain a good agreement between experimental and calculated data for the SiO₂-FeO binary system and for the SiO₂-CaO-FeO, SiO₂-MgO-FeO and SiO₂-MnO-FeO ternary systems. The viscosity of ternary systems was calculated with the model while assuming a linear function of the parameters from binary systems; however, the content of the oxygen bridges was calculated using the thermodynamic model for ternary systems.