Abstract
NiAl2O4 spinel has a high electric conductivity and a good stability in high-temperature; hence it becomes a promising candidate as anode material in aluminum electrolysis. The self-propagating high-temperature synthesis technique was employed to produce NiAl2O4 spinel by using Al and NiO as reactants, the synthesized powders were studied by using SEM and XRD. The XRD results show that different products were obtained when molar ratio (R) of NiO/Al changed, while NiAl2O4 spinel could only be formed when the ratio was higher than 1.5. The amount of the NiAl2O4 spinel reaches maximum when R was 2. The XRD results also show that the lattice constant of the spinel synthesized by the SHS was slightly smaller than the published data, which means that a lot of defaults might exist in the crystalline lattice. The reaction chemistry and the reaction mechanism were also studied in the present work.
