Ultradispersed Powdery Y2O3-Bi2O3-ZnO Composition with High Chemical Homogeneity for Fine-Grained Ceramics

Abstract

The technologically acceptable modified sol-gel technique was developed for obtaining the ultradispersed powdery composition Y2O3-Bi2O3-ZnO, which is promising new generation material for photocatalysts and solar cells. The solution for preparing a sintering composition with a high chemical homogeneity was proposed to provide using ultradispersed powders consisting of ZnO nanoparticles (40-70 nm), decorating with Bi2O3 and Y2O3 particles with average size of 4-20 nm. All synthesized powders were characterized by XRD and TEM methods. It was found that ZnO surface differently affects the dispersity of Bi2O3 and Y2O3 in the composites. TEM microphotographs show that the Bi2O3 particles uniformly distributed over ZnO surface. The Bi2O3 particle size on ZnO surface was 5-11 nm, which is significantly less than in the single powder of Bi2O3 (110-130 nm). However, in the case of Y2O3 similar effect was not observed, and average size of its crystallites was 5-12 nm, which agrees well with particle sizes in single powder.