Abstract We demonstrate that the entire set of bridging oxygen (BO; coordinations), non‐bridging O (NBO;), and O tricluster () populations may be deduced for an aluminosilicate (AS) glass by knowledge of its composition and the, , populations that are readily extracted from routine magic‐angle‐spinning (MAS) nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments. The protocol exploits a recently deduced empirical expression for estimating the hitherto experimentally inaccessible fractional population, which is employed to solve for the and populations. The method typically reproduced previously published NBO fractions derived by MAS NMR experiments within, which is almost within experimental uncertainties. The primary utility of the method, however, is for the vast majority of AS glasses for which expensive enrichment is not available, and notably so for glass systems where the MAS NMR spectrum manifest significant overlap between the resonances from the BO and NBO sites, such as AS glasses comprising, , and. Predicted speciations of ‐bearing glasses are presented and discussed. The NBO predictions of the new protocol compares markedly more favorably to experimental data than alternative options. The close structural relationship between the and high‐coordination and species are discussed. The new expressions also shed further light onto previously proposed and heavily debated (non) correlations between the populations of NBO, O triclusters, and groups in tecto‐aluminosilicate glasses which are formally free of NBO species.
Stevensson et al. (Thu,) studied this question.