Simple Synthesis of NdFeO3 Nanoparticles By the Co-Precipitation Method Based on a Study of Thermal Behaviors of Fe (III) and Nd (III) Hydroxides

Tien A Nguyen,V Pham,Bich Tram T Nguyen,Thanh L Pham,V O Mittova,Linh T Tr Nguyen,Vuong X Bui,I Ya Mittova,E L Viryutina,Lan N Vo

doi:10.3390/cryst10030219

Abstract

In this study, a nanostructured NdFeO3 material was synthesized via a simple process of the hydrolysis of Nd (III) and Fe (III) cations in hot water with 5% NaOH as a precipitating agent. According to the results of the thermal behaviors of each hydroxide, either containing Fe (III) or Nd (III), the perovskite type of neodymium orthoferrite NdFeO3 was simply synthesized by annealing a mixture of Fe (III) and Nd (III) hydroxides at 750 °C. The nanostructured NdFeO3 was obtained in spherical granules with diameters of around 30 nm. The magnetic properties of the material were a coercive force (Hc) of 136.76 Oe, a remanent magnetization (Mr) of 0.68 emu·g–1, and a saturation magnetization (Ms) of 0.79 emu·g–1.

Highlights

In recent decades, studies on the synthesis and characteristics of inorganic nanoparticles, and nano-structured materials—including chemical components, structures, and morphologies—have drawn much interest due to several advantages of nanoscale particles in comparison with micron-sized ones [1,2]
The pattern shows that the sample peaks had the typical pattern of the NdFeO3 orthorhombic phase, in agreement with the powder diffraction file (PDF) No 00-074-1473
The crystallite size of NdFeO3 orthoferrite, calculated according to Equation (1), was DXRD = 28.41 nm. This result indicates that the crystalline NdFeO3 particles possessed an average crystallite size that was smaller than that of the particles that were fabricated via ultrasound or co-precipitation techniques using octanoic acid as an organic surfactant [19,20], whereas the lattice parameters of the perovskite-type neodymium orthoferrite NdFeO3 calculated by Equations (2) and (3) were not significantly different from those associated with the samples reported in [19,20] (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Studies on the synthesis and characteristics of inorganic nanoparticles, and nano-structured materials—including chemical components, structures, and morphologies—have drawn much interest due to several advantages of nanoscale particles in comparison with micron-sized ones [1,2]. As the particle size decreases from the microscale to the nanoscale, materials based on the orthoferrites of rare-earth elements (RFeO3 , where R is a rare-earth element) exhibit a clear perovskite structure and a high sensitivity in terms of electrical and magnetic properties [3,4,5,6,7]. Nanosized NdFeO3 materials have been synthesized by various methods, including high-temperature ceramic fabrication [12,13,16,17], sol–gel [8,14], combustion [18], ultrasound, and Crystals 2020, 10, 219; doi:10.3390/cryst10030219 www.mdpi.com/journal/crystals. It is challenging to create single-phase nano-crystalline NdFeO3 particles without impurity phases such as

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Conclusion