Spark plasma sintering‐assisted sol‐gel Pechini method: An efficient approach for bulk InGaO ₃ (ZnO) m synthesis and texturation

This article reports on the development of a spark plasma sintering (SPS)‐assisted sol‐gel method for the synthesis of dense pellets, belonging to the series of InGaO 3 (ZnO) m homologous phases, where m is an integer. We show that using this synthesis route, the sintering temperature is significantly decreased down to 950–1000°C as compared to 1150°C using solid‐state synthesis methods, which enables a very good control of the materials stoichiometry by suppressing any cation volatilization. Therefore, dense single‐phase pellets can be obtained for the m values from 1 to 5. However, for larger m values, different layer stackings are observed within single individual crystallites, raising some questions about the thermodynamic stability of InGaO 3 (ZnO) m crystal structure with m > 5. Besides, a significant preferential orientation of the pellets has been observed, linked to the platelet shape of the grains, which can be controlled to some extent by tuning the SPS conditions.