1953, China urgently needed to develop Bayanobo iron mine in Inner Mongolia and build Baotou Iron and Steel Company. However, iron ore contains a lot of fluorite and rare earth elements, which are rare in the world. Its blast furnace smelting has no mature experience in the world ironmaking history, which is a pioneering work. Zhou Ren, then director of Shanghai Metallurgical Ceramics Research Institute, was the leader of the leading group of "Two Mines" (Baiyunebo Iron Mine and Daye Iron Mine) of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He overcame difficulties and took over the research task of blast furnace smelting in Baiyun Obo Iron Mine for the Institute of Metallurgical Ceramics. He made a general mobilization in the institute, quickly organized a battle group, and appointed Zou Yuanxuan as the technical director responsible for studying the mine. Under the guidance and personal participation of Zhou Ren, Zou Yuanxuan and Xu Yuansen soon built an experimental small blast furnace with a capacity of 1 m3. On the one hand, they carried out laboratory tests and small-scale blast furnace smelting tests, and systematically studied the behavior of fluorine in blast furnace smelting, including the influence of fluorine on the physical and chemical properties of blast furnace slag, as well as the change and distribution of fluorine in blast furnace smelting process. They found out the influence of fluorine-containing slag on blast furnace smelting and its erosion on different refractories. The mechanism of fluorine volatilization from ore and slag and its corrosion to blast furnace steel structure are expounded. The slagging system and the scheme of improving smelting intensity in Baiyun Obo Mine are put forward. The corrosion problem of fluorine on blast furnace steel structure and refractory brick lining is solved. It provides reliable key technical data and theoretical basis for Soviet experts to design Baotou Steel blast furnace. Especially for the refractory lining of blast furnace, Soviet experts originally planned to use carbon bricks only in the hearth of blast furnace, but the research by Zhou Ren and Zou Yuanxuan showed that high-alumina bricks and alumina-magnesia bricks were quickly eroded in high-fluorine slag, and only carbon bricks could resist the erosion of high-fluorine slag, so they changed from hearth to lower part of furnace body (except tuyere area) to carbon bricks, thus avoiding a possible big accident. This research work won the third prize of 1982 National Natural Science Award.
In order to extract valuable rare earth elements from Baotou Steel blast furnace slag containing 4% ~ 5% rare earth oxides, Zou Yuanxuan proposed to reduce rare earth elements in slag by ferrosilicon reduction method, and successfully manufactured rare earth ferrosilicon alloy. At that time, this alloy was called "Baotou Steel 1 alloy". This method has the advantages of low raw materials and simple equipment, and has made important contributions to the comprehensive utilization of rare earth resources in China. This process of recovering rare earth metals has no precedent in the world, so it won the second prize of 1965 national invention and was praised by national leaders many times.
From 65438 to 0957, China was eager to develop Panzhihua vanadium-titanium magnetite, and its blast furnace smelting was also a big problem in the world. Xu Yuansen and Zou Yuanxuan systematically studied the physical and chemical properties and mineral composition of titanium-bearing blast furnace slag, and found out the thickening mechanism of titanium-bearing blast furnace slag under blast furnace smelting conditions. During the test on the 1 m3 small test furnace, according to Xu Yuansen's suggestion, the special blast tuyere was creatively adopted, which solved the technical key of high titanium slag blocking the hearth, and provided reliable technical data and theoretical basis for the blast furnace design and smelting scheme selection of Panzhihua Iron and Steel Company. This work won the fourth prize of 1982 National Natural Science Award.
During the same period, Zou Yuanxuan also led the research on hydrometallurgy and steelmaking, such as the extraction of cobalt, the leaching of alumina, the extraction of titanium oxide and manganese. Excellent achievements have made important contributions to the comprehensive utilization of various minerals in China.
The concept of "activity" in metallurgical physical chemistry is a powerful tool to study the actual reaction of high temperature melt, which can be understood as "effective concentration". Zou Yuanxuan successfully calculated the activity coefficients of copper, manganese, silicon and sulfur in liquid iron and their influence by carbon in iron in his doctoral thesis "Distribution of some elements between liquid iron and silver" submitted to Carnegie Institute of Technology in the United States from 65438 to 0947, and revised the traditional desulfurization mechanism in steelmaking process, providing a basis for the determination of the activity of elements in liquid metal. The success of this research work not only makes him among the best graduates in the whole school, but also lays the foundation for his future career.
From 65438 to 0952, Zou Yuanxuan founded and led the research work of metallurgical physical chemistry in Shanghai Institute of Metallurgical Ceramics, and completed more than 30 series of academic papers, such as The Effect of Fluorine on the Viscosity, Meltability and Desulfurization of Blast Furnace Slag, which were published in China Science, Journal of Metals and Science Bulletin respectively. These papers cover a wide range of contents, involving the activity of components in slag and metal, the balance between slag and metal, and the basic physical and chemical theories of pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical processes. A great deal of research on the component activity and free energy of formation of intermetallic compounds in binary and ternary metallurgical systems has accumulated valuable data for metallurgical physical chemistry, many of which have been included in university textbooks and encyclopedias. In addition, in the activity measurement, Zou Yuanxuan broke the traditional practice that ferrous metallurgy workers usually take iron as the metal phase, adopted some non-ferrous metal phases, and then obtained the activity of each component by using the modified Gibbs-Duheim formula and the sum or quotient of the activity coefficients of the two components, thus successfully solving the long-standing international problems such as crucible material selection, chemical reaction design, and activity determination of trace elements.
Under the leadership of Zou Yuanxuan, the research level of metallurgical physical chemistry of Shanghai Metallurgical Ceramics Research Institute in the 1950s and 1960s was not only leading in China, but also famous internationally.
Beginning in the 1960s, according to the development trend of world science and technology, Zou was anxious for the country, regardless of his later years, and resolutely turned to the research field of pure metal and compound semiconductor materials. He applied the principles of metallurgy to the purification of high-purity elements and the preparation of compound semiconductor materials. He skillfully used the reaction between metallurgical melts, precipitation refining, fractional crystallization, extraction, sublimation, rectification and vacuum distillation to purify elemental elements. Under his leadership, the preparation technology of high-purity elements such as gallium, phosphorus and arsenic has been popularized in relevant domestic factories, and won the third prize of industrial new products of the State Planning Commission, the State Science and Technology Commission and the State Economic Commission 1964 respectively.
In order to realize the high-purity growth of III-V compound crystals such as gallium arsenide, indium antimonide, indium arsenide, indium antimony bismuth, etc., based on the analysis of the properties of the remaining donors and acceptors in the crystals, Zou proposed and completed a special treatment method at high temperature in an ordinary container, thus greatly reducing the contents of impurity sodium and some heavy metal elements. This method won the third prize of 1983 national invention.
In addition, under the guidance of Zou Yuanxuan, the research on the new technology of timely boat coating, the new method of in-situ solidification growth of undoped semi-insulating GaAs single crystal at atmospheric pressure and the growth of high-quality GaAs thin films by inclined liquid phase epitaxy has been completed. These works won the second prize of 1985 National Science and Technology Progress Award.
Zou Yuanxuan has published more than 70 academic papers on semiconductor physical chemistry. His contribution is not only to extend the principle of metallurgical physics and chemistry to the study of semiconductor materials; More importantly, he unified two seemingly completely different disciplines, solid semiconductor material defects and metallurgical melting, into the basic discipline of chemistry, and made important contributions to the application, development and exploration of physical chemistry.
Since 1970s, Zou Yuanxuan has put forward three key problems of gallium arsenide quality from the metallurgical point of view, namely, unknown acceptor, structural defect and "mobility executioner". In 1972, he summarized hundreds of data of carrier concentration and mobility of N-type gallium arsenide grown by different methods at home and abroad, and obtained a correlation function relationship between residual acceptor and residual donor concentration. Based on this, he boldly predicted that there were acceptor defects in GaAs materials that people didn't realize at that time, that is, the so-called "unknown acceptor", which affected the compensation degree of the materials. Through experiments, he found that the chemical impurity sodium is one of the unknown receptors that are often ignored. Later, with the further improvement of the purity of gallium arsenide, he found that there were some acceptor-type structural defects (non-impurities) in addition to sodium in the unknown acceptor. In 1974, Zou speculated that there may be two acceptor defects, GaAsVGa and AsGaVGa, which coexist and have almost the same concentration. This prediction was confirmed by foreign scholars (Lang) and (Logan) in 1975 with the test results of the newly invented deep-level transient spectrometer. These two acceptor defects are called A and B traps. The "mobility executioner" is essentially a space charge scattering center, and its scattering cross section to carriers is almost two orders of magnitude larger than that of ordinary ionized impurities, which seriously affects the electrical properties of GaAs materials. Under the leadership of Zou Yuanxuan, a large number of experiments were carried out on gallium arsenide materials by liquid phase epitaxy and gas phase epitaxy, revealing that its microstructure is a silicon-oxygen compound.
In the early 1980s, with the in-depth study of defects in semiconductor materials and the rapid development of GaAs devices, many theorists and experimenters in the world began to pay attention to the defect properties of the so-called "EL2" deep donor level in GaAs materials. This defect is common in GaAs materials grown by different methods and has many abnormal properties, which plays a decisive role in the performance of large-scale integrated circuits and other devices. In 1970s, Zou Yuanxuan put forward for the first time in the world that the defect of EL2 may be a ternary complex of AsGaVAsVGa by applying the law of physical and chemical mass action of 198 1 year on the basis of structural defect research. Since then, scientists from all over the world have put forward more than ten opinions from different aspects according to their own experimental data, and think that the defects of EL2 may be isolated anti-atoms and other binary and ternary complexes. Most of these scientists use physical research methods. Zou Yuanxuan and others not only carefully studied all these results, but also analyzed the mutual growth and decline relationship and internal relations of some defects under various changing conditions, thus comprehensively summed up a powerful standard for judging EL2 defects, namely "fingerprint characteristics". Later, according to the results of quantum chemical calculation and electron paramagnetic * * earthquake experiment, the formation mechanism of EL2 defects in crystals, the metastable mechanism of EL2 defects under low temperature illumination and the essence of "EL2 family" phenomenon are further proposed by applying the principle of physical and chemical phase law, thus forming a relatively complete EL2 defect model. After Zou Yuanxuan's death, this model was called "Zou Model" by the international academic circles, which thought that it could explain almost all the electrical and optical properties of EL2 in detail, and praised the physical and chemical methods used by Zou Yuanxuan and others as very useful means to identify the properties of deep-level point defects in semiconductor materials.
Zou Yuanxuan's achievements in semiconductor physical chemistry, 1987 won the third prize of national natural science, and 199 1 won the first prize of natural science of China Academy of Sciences.