Synthesis, Characterization and Applications of Iron Oxide Nanoparticles - a Short Review

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Iron oxide is a polymorphous crystalline mineral, including hematite, a-Fe₂O₃, magnetite, Fe₃O₄ and maghemite, g-Fe₂O₃. In the area of solid propulsion, nanoparticulate materials such, hematite and maghemite, exhibit high performance on thermal decomposition of ammonium perchlorate (AP).The best catalytic effect of metallic iron oxide nanoparticles was attributed to its small particle size, more active sites and high surface area, which prove most gas adsorption of released products during the thermal reactions of oxidizer. Nowadays, metallic iron nanoparticles can be synthesized via many methods, by co-precipitation, sol-gel, microemulsion, or thermal decomposition. Although there are data on these synthetic methods in the literature, there is a lack of details in nanoparticulate oxides and on the characterization techniques used. In this context, this short review presents methods for obtaining nanoparticulate iron oxides and characteristics of the different characterization techniques and decomposition of these nanomaterials. The morphologies and structures can be characterized by transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, X-ray powder diffraction, and FT- IR spectroscopy and the textural properties by physical adsorption.