The effect of calcination temperature on the X-ray peak broadening of t-CuFe2O4

CuFe2O4 ferrite was synthesized by citrate precursor and then calcined at 800, 900, and 1000 °C. Structural properties showed that the X-ray diffraction patterns of the samples could be easily indexed to tetragonal CuFe2O4 ferrite with the spatial group the I 41/AMD. As the calcination temperature increased, the larger Cu2+ ion at the tetragonal site substituted the smaller Fe3+ ion at the octahedral site. The half-width of X-ray diffraction peaks can be affected by several factors such as instrumentation, crystallite size, and lattice microstrain broadening. The results of crystallite size and Microstrain estimated by different methods for the samples show that the Size-strain Plot method is more accurate, the value of R2 is close to 1 and all data points touch the fitting line better than other methods. The results showed that the increase in crystal size with calcination temperature could be mainly attributed to the increase of stretching microstrain.