Synthesis of barium titanate nanopowder by a soft chemical process Sushmita Ghosh, Subrata Dasgupta ⁎ , Amarnath Sen, Himadri Sekhar Maiti Central Glass and Ceramic Research Institute, Kolkata 700 032, India Received 6 December 2005; accepted 4 May 2006 Available online 26 May 2006 Abstract A simple soft chemical method of synthesizing barium titanate nanopowders and nanorods is described here, where titanium dioxide/titanium isopropoxide was taken as a source of titanium, tartaric acid was taken as a template material, nitric acid as an oxidizing agent. The synthesized powders and rods were characterized by XRD, TG and DTA, SEM and IR spectroscopy. In this process phase pure barium titanate nanopowders and nanorods can be prepared at a temperature of 900 °C and the process is simple and cost-effective. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Nanorod; Solution evaporation; Template 1. Introduction The rapid growth of the electronic component industry has led to a demand for miniatured multilayer ceramic capacitor (MLCC), where BaTiO 3 is used due to its superior frequency characteristics, higher reliability, high breakdown voltage, excellent volumetric efficiency of the capacitance and reduced cost [1]. MLCCs with a dielectric thickness of 2 μm have already been commercialized but the next generation components demand a thickness of 1 μm. Such requirement demands nanosized dielectric powders with uniform composition and size distribution, and weak agglomer- ation to allow low temperature sintering with minimum grain growth. Various methods of preparation of BaTiO 3 is available in the literature. The solid state route needs high calcination temperature to get perovskite phase and often results in the formation of multiphase and inhomogeneous powders [2–5]. High energy ball milling [6] is also reported to produce 10nm particle size but the approach suffers from small batch size, high processing time and energy consumption. The complex double metal salts methods [7–9] involve the use of solid precursors for the manufacture of pure BaTiO 3 . The process suffers from the use of costly materials, multisteps, uncontrolled particle size and interparticle agglomeration. Pechini's autocombustion method [10] is also reported to produce 10 nm particle size where costly materials are used but the approach suffers from small batch volume. Hydrothermal process [11–14] involves the incorpora- tion of costly materials and the optimization of it has often been a matter of empiricism. In the present paper, we report the formation of phase pure BaTiO 3 in the form of powders (mostly rod shaped) by a soft chemical technique where the TiO 2 /titanium isopropoxide and Ba (NO 3 ) 2 were used as starting materials, tartaric acid as a chelating agent and HNO 3 is used as an oxidizing agent. Materials Letters 61 (2007) 538 – 541 www.elsevier.com/locate/matlet ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: sdasgupta@cgcri.res.in (S. Dasgupta). Fig. 1. X-ray diffraction patterns of BaTiO 3 , calcined at 600 °C, 700 °C, 800 °C and 900 °C. 0167-577X/$ - see front matter © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.matlet.2006.05.006