Ultrafast Hydro-Micromechanical Synthesis of Calcium Zincate: Structural and Morphological Characterizations

Abstract EN

Calcium zincate is a compound with a large panel of application: mainly known as an advantageous replacement of zinc oxide in negative electrodes for air-zinc or nickel-zinc batteries, it is also used as precursor catalyst in biodiesel synthesis and as antifungal compound for the protection of limestone monuments.

However, its synthesis is not optimized yet.

In this study, it was elaborated using an ultrafast synthesis protocol: Hydro-Micromechanical Synthesis.

Two other synthesis methods, Hydrochemical Synthesis and Hydrothermal Synthesis, were used for comparison.

In all cases, the as-synthesized samples were analyzed by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, and LASER diffraction particle size analysis.

Rietveld method was used to refine various structural parameters and obtain an average crystallite size, on a Hydro-Micromechanical submicronic sample.

X-ray single crystal structure determination was performed on a crystal obtained by Hydrochemical Synthesis.

It has been shown that regardless of the synthesis protocol, the prepared samples always crystallize in the same crystal lattice, with P21/c space group and only differ from their macroscopic textural parameters.

Nevertheless, only the Hydro-Micromechanical method is industrially scalable and enables a precise control of the textural parameters of the obtained calcium zincate.