Hydrothermal synthesis of chalcopyrite using an environmental friendly chelating agent

An environmental friendly route to fabricate CuFeS2 nanoparticles is presented. In this study, the CuFeS2 nanoparticles were synthesized using a hydrothermal chelation method at relatively low temperature and without introducing organic solvents. The citric acid was added as a chelating agent, which may decrease the impurity phase. The synthesized CuFeS2 nanoparticles were characterized by XRD, SEM, TEM, FTIR and UV-vis. The characterization results showed that the citric acid could form chelating complexes with iron and copper and promote the hydrothermal reaction. The synthesized CuFeS2 nanoparticles have cuboidal crystal forms with particle sizes between 100 and 200 nm. The energy gap was measured to be 0.53 eV. Crown Copyright (C) 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.