Sol-gel combustion synthesis of chromium doped yttrium aluminum perovskites

A water-based sol-gel combustion synthesis was optimized in order to achieve pure yttrium aluminium perovskite (YAlO3, YAP). The method involved three main steps: xerogel formation, combustion treatment and calcination of the combusted precursors. TG DTA, FTIR and XRPD, used to investigate the precursor phase evolution, confirmed the strong influence of gel synthesis conditions, combustion temperature and calcination rate on YAP purity. Both stoichiometry and kinetics control during all the preparation steps are crucial in order to avoid the formation of undesired Y3Al5O12 (YAG) and Y4Al2O9 (YAM) stable phases. This method allowed to synthesize, for the first time from an aqueous sol-gel process, single phase samples of YAP. A series of samples with composition: YAl(1-x)Cr(x)O3 where x is 0, 0.035, 0.135, 0.250, 0.500, 0.750 was obtained. A consistent decrease of calcination temperature, with respect to conventional solid state synthesis, was achieved by sol-gel combustion, avoiding polyphase materials even without the use of mineralizers. This is an important result in several applications like the synthesis of ceramic pigments.