Mechanical activation assisted synthesis of pure nanocrystalline forsterite powder

Single phase nanocrystalline forsterite powder was successfully synthesized by mechanical activation of talc and magnesium carbonate powder mixture followed by annealing. Simultaneous thermal analysis (STA), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) techniques were utilized to characterize the as-milled and annealed samples. The results showed that a single phase nanocrystalline forsterite with a crystallite size of 35 nm was obtained by annealing of 10 h ball milled sample at 1000 °C for 1 h. Further milling had no significant effect on structure and crystallite size of forsterite phase. Atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS) analysis showed that the amount of Fe and Cr in 100 h ball milled sample were 0.2838% and 0.00175%, respectively.