Research Progress in Structure of Molten Salts

Abstract

Investigation of molten salts structure will benefit its’ application in molten salts reactor, spent fuel reprocessing and concentrating solar power plant. This manuscript summarized previous researches concerning the short-range and intermediate-range structure of molten salts. The major existence form of cations, the average coordination number, distribution of coordination number, the distribution of ion distance, the cation-anion alternation, the anion-sharing network in molten salts are discussed in this article. It also addresses the origin of peaks in structure function that are obtained from X-ray scattering and neutron scattering experiments. Finally, this paper discusses the feature works that can be done in this research field.

Keywords

• molten salts
• intermediate-range structure
• x-ray scattering
• theoretical studies