Rietveld Study on Evolution of Crystalline Structure of YSZ Nanoparticles during Co-Precipitation Synthesis

The evolution of crystalline structure of YSZ nanoparticles during co-precipitation synthesis was studied by X-ray diffraction via Rietveld refinement. Results show that the transformation of hydroxides to tetragonal nanoparticles is dependent on the calcination temperature. The tetragonal nanoparticles transformed at low calcination temperature have a distortion lattice; the lattice parameters vary with the increase of calcination temperature and are recovered when calcinated at temperature of 1200 °C. The grain size of tetragonal nanoparticles slightly decreases first and then increases with increasing of calcination temperature. The reasons that caused the distortion of lattice were discussed and the activation energy of grain growth was calculated.