Design, fabrication, and magnetic properties of novel (Ni,Cr,Zr)-co-doped M-type barium ferrite ceramics

Multicomponent co-doping is an effective method to balance the counteracting magnetic properties of ferrite ceramics. In this work, novel (Ni,Cr,Zr)-co-doped M-type barium hexaferrites (BaFe12-3xNixCrxZrxO19, x = 0-0.8) were designed and synthesized by traditional solid-state reaction. Thermogravimetric analysis indicated that NiO would participate in the formation of secondary phase NiFe2O4 in the as-synthesized powder. Through tradi-tional solid-state sintering, by using the synthesized pure-phase magnetic powders, almost full-dense ceramics were fabricated. Visual high-temperature deformation analysis revealed that there was no obvious difference in the sintering behavior and densification temperature of the ceramics with different compositional x, due to the low sintering activity of the as-synthesized magnetic powders. And X-ray diffraction analysis indicated that all the fabricated ceramics are of pure-phase M-type barium ferrite, and the lattice parameter c/a firstly increased as x raised up to 0.4 and then remained almost unchanged with further increased x, even if the lattice distortion became heavier. Microstructure examination revealed that the grain size monotonously decreased as the quantity of the substituent ions increased. The remnant magnetization and coercivity of the fabricated ceramics decreased monotonously as x increased, while the saturated magnetization could be maintained till the samples with x <= 0.4. Taking all the parameters into consideration, the samples with x = 0.4 might be a good candidate for transformer cores.