Mixed- and general-order kinetics applied to selected thermoluminescence glow curves

Mixed-order (MO) and general-order (GO) kinetics expressions are applied to experimental glow curves of CaSO4:Ce, LiNaSO4:Eu, BaF2:Ce and SrF2:Er. The purpose is to compare the activation energies derived from the two models to investigate the correlation between the order of kinetics, b, and the parameter alpha of the MO model for real systems and to explore the validity of the correlation between b and alpha derived from the analysis of synthetic glow peaks or experimentally isolated single peak for complex glow curves. The two alternative routes resulted in clean fits with very close values of the sum of squared residuals. The general conclusions are: (1) the activation energies derived from the MO model are slightly higher than the ones derived from the GO model, but the difference appears to be insignificant, (2) the correlation between b and alpha is not smooth and the scatter in the b values for a given alpha is within the theoretically expected spread in the b value and (3) the MO expression is capable of evaluating the shape parameters as accurately as the GO expression with the advantage that it has a physical basis contrary to the purely empirical GO model.