The composition I have made is Neodymium doped Barium Zirconium Titanate. I have calcined the materials for 2 hours at 1200 C and sintered the material for 4 hours at 1400 C. After cooling the pellets in room temperature, they became very brittle and the brittleness increased with the percentage of neodymium in the base compound. Your suggestions for the occurrence of this behaviour would help me for proceeding.
Have you estimated final porosity and the average grain size? Do you see any impurity phases on XRD?
Fully Agreeing with Roman Kubrin, I would like to add a few points:
1. Check for your precursor purity, a lot of the times trace elements may affect the system adversely.
2. If you are following the solid state reaction/chemical route, please do check if your initial calculation was correct or not
3. If possible, try doing an XRF or ICP on your sintered sample to check the composition.
4. While doing the density calculation, you may need to do wax coating on your samples if they are
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