Cost-Effective Synthesis of Cobalt Ferrite Nanoparticles by Sol-Gel Technique

In material science, doping method is employed to produce nanoferrites with desired characteristics. Recently, cobalt doped iron oxide nanomaterials have gained importance in industry for multiple electronic/electrical applications. Large number of methods have been adopted for the synthesis of nanoparticles (NPs), but high manufacturing cost, uniform sized, and anisotropic behaviors limit the commercial applications. In the presented work, cobalt doped (Co-Fe nanomaterials) are developed by a cost-effective sol-gel approach. The doped cobalt ferrites NPs (1%, 2%, and 3% doping of cobalt) were prepared and characterized by XRD, SEM & TEM, FTIR, and VSM techniques. XRD and microscopic (SEM & TEM) analysis revealed synthesis of hexagonal structured cobalt ferrite sized from ~16nm to ~8nm, with the increasing doping pattern of Cobalt from 1% to 3%. FTIR analysis showed the formation of well-structured oxides, which is in strong agreement with XRD and microscopy techniques. Moreover, VSM analysis revealed that cobalt ferrite nanoparticles possess ferromagnetic properties with Ms, Mr and Hc values of 0.038emu/g, 0.005emu/g and 405.19Oe respectively. In addition, squareness (Mr/Ms = 0.16) indicates the presence of single domain spherical particles.