Microstructural and magnetic investigation of vanadium-substituted Sr-nanohexaferrite

In the present study, the preparation of nanocrystalline strontium vanadium nanohexaferrites was undertaken using a sol-gel auto-combustion method. The structural and morphological properties were characterized using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infra-red (FT-IR) analysis, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The XRD analysis showed that the crystallite sizes (t) of the products vary between 55 and 60 nm, while the SEM analysis confirmed the hexagonal platelet structure of the products. The magnetic hysteresis loops indicated that the synthesized nanohexaferrites exhibit ferrimagnetic-like (FM) behavior. The deduced saturation (M-s) and the remnant (M-r) magnetizations, the coercive (H-c) and magneto-crystalline anisotropy (H-a) fields diminished as the V3+ content increased. The H-a values are very high, pointing to the hard FM characteristics of the synthesized nanohexaferrites. Except for x = 0.0, the squareness ratios, M-r/M-s, are below 0.50, suggesting the presence of multi-domain nano-sized particles for SrFe12-xVxO19 (0.00 <= x <= 0.1) nanohexaferrites.