The hydrolysis of rare earth carbides

Abstract

The hydrolysis products of some rare earth carbides, oxycarbides and nitride-carbides have been studied. With hydrolysis under gentle conditions, product distributions are simple and consistently reproducible, and are representative of the carbon species in the lattice. Consideration of the surface chemistry of the hydrolysis reaction is important in interpretation of results. The use of the hydrolysis reaction to study the nature of the carbon species in carbon-containing phases of several binary and ternary rare earth metal systems is outlined.