Marlies K. Van Bael

Name: Marlies K. Van Bael
Title: Dr.
Institution: Laboratory of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry - IMO - Limburgs Universitair Centrum
Address: Universitaire Campus, building D
City, ZIP code: Diepenbeek 3590
Country: Belgium
E-mail: marlies.vanbael@luc.ac.be
Interests: Glassy and amorphous systems, Theory, Liquids, Novel data analysis methods, Nanostructures and superlattices, Instrumentation, Superconductors, Coordination chemistry, High temperature studies, Materials science, Combined techniques, Solid solutions, sol-gel
Keywords: sol-gel
multimetal oxides
ferroelectrics
EXAFS
amorphous
metal chelates
acetate
citrate
PZT
PZN
SBT
BLT
ZnO
XAFS

Brief description of the work:

One of our main research topics is soft chemical synthesis (mainly sol-gel methods) of multimetal oxides (e.g. superconductors, ferroelectrics, ionic conductors, semiconductors). We study the sol-gel process in order to have more fundamental insight in the ongoing reactions and to be able to optimize the materials properties by modifying the chemistry of the sol-gel system and other processing parameters. Since throughout the sol-gel process materials are amorphous, EXAFS is an indispenable technique to obtain information about the structure of the precursor gels (by means of the chemical environment of the constituting metals) and to find out how this determines the properties of the end products.