The Specialized Group on Calorimetry and Thermal Analysis (GECAT) of the Royal Spanish Society of Chemistry and the Royal Spanish Society of Physics has awarded the prize for the best doctoral thesis in 2017 to Eva Gil González from the Institute of Materials Science of Seville (ICMS), attached to cicCartuja.
Eva’s doctoral thesis is entitled Mechanosynthesis and Characterization of Nanostructured Multiferroic Materials and was defended on October 6, 2017, obtaining the grade of Outstanding “Cum Laude” unanimously, and the title of Doctor from the University of Seville, with International Mention.
The thesis directors were Drs. Antonio Perejón Pazo and Luis Allan Pérez Maqueda. The Thesis focuses on the synthesis, processing and characterization of high quality multiferroic materials by alternative methods to conventional ones. Specifically, the preparation of BiFeO3 and related materials is addressed -since they are the most promising multiferroic materials- due to the fact that they simultaneously present their electrical and magnetic properties at room temperature. This quality makes these materials tremendously versatile with practical applications in technological fields as diverse as data storage, photocatalysis or photovoltaic energy production.
Despite their versatility and high potential for use as electroceramics, their implementation is hampered by their difficulty in obtaining them as a pure phase using traditional procedures. For this reason, in this Doctoral Thesis, new synthesis and sintering methodologies are proposed and developed to solve these problems, such as mechanosynthesis, “flash-sintering” or “reactive flash-sintering”.