Investigation on the effect of various fuels on the synthesis of strontium oxide nanoparticles.

The solution combustion synthesis (SCS) method has been used to prepare strontium oxide [SrO₂] nanoparticles using strontium nitrate [Sr (NO₃)₂] as an oxidizer. In order to study the effects of different fuels on the synthesis of SrO₂ nanoparticles, different fuels like urea [CH₄N₂O], citric acid [C₆H₈O₇] and glycine [C₂H₅NO₂] were used. The synthesized nanoparticles were subjected to various characterization techniques such as X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and UV Visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy for analysing the structural and optical properties of synthesized samples. The XRD result confirms that the samples are crystalline in nature and the crystallite sizes were found to be 41.90 nm, 47.37 nm and 44.30 nm for CH₄N₂O, C₂H₅NO₂ and C₆H₈O₇ based SrO₂ respectively. The FTIR results shows that there is bending and stretching of bonds because of H-O-H, −OH, and C=O groups. The bandgap (E_g) of the synthesized samples was calculated using UV-Visible spectra and are found to be 5.21 eV, 5.97 eV and 5.89 eV for SrO₂ synthesized using CH₄N₂O, C₂H₅NO₂ and C₆H₈O₇ respectively. The results show that the SrO₂ using C₂H₅NO₂ has more bandgap and SrO₂ synthesized using C₂H₅NO₂ has more crystallite size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]