Antimony-doped tin oxide nanocrystallites prepared by a combustion process

Nanocrystalline antimony-doped tin oxide (ATO) has been successfully synthesized for the first time by the combustion process, using nitrate as an oxidizer and citrate as a fuel, and the starting metal sources are granulated tin and Sb2O3. The ATO crystallites are characterized by means of thermogravimetry differential scanning calorimetry (TG-DSC), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Brunauer, Emmett, and Teller adsorption (BET) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). It is found that the fuel-to-oxidizer molar ratio has great effect on the quality of the ATO nanocrystallites. The average crystallite size decreases with the increase of fuel-to-oxidizer molar ratio, while the specific surface area shows a linearly increasing tendency. Crystallites with an average size of 15.2 nm and the highest surface area 39.7 m(2) g(-1) are obtained when the fuel-to-oxidizer ratio is about 0.41. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.