Investigation of Effect of Sintering Temperature / Phase on Electrical Properties of Iron Titanates

It has been observed that the semiconducting metal oxides and / mixed metal oxides show changes in the electrical properties with sensitivity to humidity and / or various gases .Therefore attention of the research workers in solid state physics has been attracted towards the semiconducting oxide environmental sensors due to the growing concern towards the pollution control. Iron titanium oxides have received considerable attention as possible electrode materials for photo electrolysis of water. Also they are of interest to geologists, being the primary ceramics of rock magnetism. Recently, Fe2TiO5 has attracted attention due to its thermal expansion anisotropy and spontaneous microcracking. However, the data on its electrical transport as well as dielectric properties of this is scarce. . Electrical properties as a function of temperature and relaxation spectra are discussed in this paper. At temperatures 10000C and 12500C samples of Fe2TiO5 using rutile and anatase titanium oxide are sintered. Ceramic technique is used to synthesize these samples. The XRD and FTIR techniques are used for the confirmation of pseudobrookite phase of the samples. All the samples have orthorhombic structure. Relaxation spectra showed the space-charge, which is higher for higher sintering temperature for the sample prepared from rutile TiO2. The sample prepared from anatase TiO2 has lower dielectric and electric properties at low frequency (1kHz). The parameters such as dielectric constant, dielectric loss and resitivity are discussed and analysed on the basis of structural changes.