Preparation of lithium aluminate via polymeric precursor routes

Gamma lithium aluminate is a potential candidate for tritium breeding material. Various preparation routes have been proposed including solid state reaction methods and wet chemical methods such as sol–gel process. But it is still needed to develop reliable and economic preparation methods that can be used for large production. In this paper, we examined three polymeric precursor methods – amorphous citrate process, Pechini process, and polyvinyl alcohol-assisted process – by studying thermal behavior of the precursor powders by X-ray diffractometry, differential thermal analysis, Infrared spectrometry, and BET surface area analysis. All these three processes produced phase pure gamma lithium aluminate powders at a relatively low temperature. The phase purity and processing temperature were comparable to the alkoxide derived sol–gel method and yet these polymeric precursor methods did not require high quality starting materials such as alkoxides.