Preparation and Characterization of Metal Carbide Nanoparticles

Abstract

Metal carbide (Fe₃C) powder has been prepared by a high energed ball mill. The repeated milling of the powder sample leads to lattice distortion which gives rise to microstrains in the lattice. These microstrains increase the contribution of static component of Debye-Waller factor. Thus both lattice strain and the observed Debye-Waller factor, which is the sum of static and thermal components, increase with grinding time. Thus, the resulting nanoparticle powders were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) measurements. The integrated intensities have been measured with a Philips CWU 3710 X-ray powder diffractometer fitted with a scintillation counter using filtered CuK radiation at room temperature and have been corrected for thermal diffuse scattering.

Keywords: Fe₃C Ball milling, XRD, SEM, lattice parameters, particle size, lattice strain, Debye-Waller factor.