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Citrate-nitrate autocombustion process is a promising synthesis route in the field of nanomaterials. This route involves many controlling parameters which ultimately affect properties of the products. In the present research work, the effect of concentration of fuel to that of metal nitrates has been studied in a systematic manner. The nature of exothermic reaction was analyzed with DSC-TGA and the powder properties were characterized by XRD, TEM and BET measurement. The properties of the powders have been explained with respect to fuel content, vigorousness of the exothermic reaction, combustion temperature and duration. The most vigorous reaction was found to occur for the composition with FER of 0.50 with the production of the smallest crystallite size of 9 nm.

A series of glass sealants for solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) with compositions SrO (x wt %) La2O3 (15 wt %) Al2O3 (15 wt %) B2O3 (40-x wt %) SiO2 (30 wt %) [x = 10, 15, 20, 25 & 30] [SLABS] have been investigated by quantitative Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR). Structural findings from FTIR reveal that with increasing substitu-tion of B2O3 by SrO, even though the B2O3/SiO2 ratio decreases, however the Si-O- non-bridging bond content in the matrix is increasing and glass structure is getting more inverted. UV-Vis Diffused Reflectance Spectroscopy (UV-Vis-DRS) of the glass series shows that electrical band gap of glasses decreases in the series from 3.07eV to 2.97eV with increasing substitution from x = 10 to x = 30. Conductivities of the glass samples were measured by AC impedance spectroscopy and found to be increasing from 2.74 × 10-5 Scm-1 to 1.09 × 10-4 Scm-1 with increasing substitution from x =10 to x = 30.