Investigation on the structure formation, morphology, electronic and magnetic properties of BaFe12O19 nanopowders synthesized by utilizing sol-gel technique using L-sorbose as a fuel agent

Hexagonal barium ferrite (BaFe₁₂O₁₉) is a highly magnetic material due to its high resistivity, large permeability and low loss behaviour. It was mainly focused on applications in the electric, magnetic and telecom industries because of their good dielectric properties at microwave frequencies. The brown colored nanoparticles (NPs) of BaFe₁₂O₁₉ were carried out by the sol-gel approach using L-sorbose as a fuel synthesized from the ethylene glycol and oxalic acids. The synthesized nanopowders were characterized by thermal, X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), FT-IR, photoluminescence (PL), ultraviolet visible (UV–Vis), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), cyclic voltammetry (CV) and vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM) techniques. XRD peak indicates the formation of good quality nanocrystalline hexagonal BaFe12O19 phase of the synthesized sample. The FT-IR spectra exhibited the significant vibrational frequencies of BaFe12O19 NPs were detected at 448, 578 and 768 cm⁻¹ for 800 °C, which suggests the formation of a hexagonal phase. The SEM images of BaFe₁₂O₁₉ powders at 800 °C indicated the micro-sized flakes shape with crystallite size ranging from 40 to 65 nm. The EDS was performed to analyze the total energy distributions and elemental individual content of the prepared powders and it was also found that the content of Ba reduced as the content of Fe increased. Further, the physical properties of the synthesized NPs were determined by VSM analyzer and the high saturation magnetization (M_s = 18.41 emu/g), remanence magnetization (M_r = 10.20 emu/g) and magnetization coercive force (H_c = 5707 Oe). Overall, these results suggested the prepared nanoparticles calcined at 800 °C have the good potential for utilization in many applications such as magnetic recording, fast random access memory, electronic devices, etc.