Nucleation and growth of CdC2O4·3H2O single crystals in silica gels

As part of our work on growth of cadmium oxalate single crystals in gels, we describe here variation of nucleation density and growth of these crystals as a function of concentration of feed solution, gel ageing, gel density, gel pH and intermediate neutral gel column. While high density and high pH gels have been found to produce opaque crystals, good quality transparent single crystals have been obtained in low density and low pH gels. It was observed that the intermediate neutral gel column and gel ageing considerably reduced the number of nucleation sites and increased the size of the crystals without affecting their quality. By concentration programming the size of the crystals increased.