Journal of Materials Science, Vol.46, No.12, 4361-4367, 2011
Initial transient structure and chemistry of intergranular glassy films in ferric-oxide doped strontium titanate ceramics
Intergranular glassy films (IGFs) often play a key role in the formation of microstructure and the resultant properties in titanate-based materials. In this article, a systematic study of IGF structure and chemistry is reported in Fe2O3-doped SrTiO3 ceramics sintered under different temperatures and dwelling times. IGFs exhibit a large variation in their thicknesses, although majority of them are still formed by the lower energy {100}, {110}, and {111} planes from one side, which is also true for those grain boundaries (GBs) without IGF and reveals no particular effect of crystallography on IGF width. Furthermore, two trends of IGF chemical composition were found coexisting in each sample, one rich in Ti and the other in Sr, and both containing Fe segregants. The change of sintering temperature did not show significant effect on the distributions for both trends. However, increase of the dwelling time is effective to turn some Sr-rich IGFs to Ti-rich IGF, indicating that the former is in a transient state and the equilibrium IGF has most likely a TiO2-based composition.