Microwave assisted synthesis of CoFe₂O₄ nanoparticles by utilizing organic promoters and evaluation of its properties

Nano-sized spinel ferrites are highly regarded owing to their special optical, electrical and magnetic properties. Cobalt ferrite, CoFe₂O₄, is a nominee of particular interest due to its high saturation magnetization, high coercivity, strong anisotropy and excellent chemical stability. The synthesis of these materials with a pure crystalline phase is sometimes limited due to the required high temperatures for their calcination. In this work, we report a one-pot simple synthesis procedure of cobalt ferrite by the auto-combustion under microwave irradiation into a domestic microwave oven with a power of 900W for 30 min. Glycine and ammonium nitrate were used as organic promoters and metal nitrates as precursors. The synthesized nanoparticles were characterized by fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersion of x-ray spectrometry (EDX) techniques. The electrochemical properties and capability of the prepared product as a pseudocapacitive material were evaluated using cyclic voltammetry (CV) tests in details.