Characterization of nanocrystalline ZnO:Al films by sol-gel spin coating method

Abstract

Articles you may be interested inHigh-κ TiO2 thin film prepared by sol-gel spin-coating method AIP Conf. Proc. 1665, 080015 (2015); 10.1063/1.4917919 Effect of Fe incorporation on the optical behavior of ZnO thin films prepared by sol-gel derived spin coating techniques AIP Conf.Abstract. Nanocrystalline ZnO films doped with aluminium by sol-gel spin coating method have been investigated using optical transmittance UV-Vis and X-ray diffraction (X-RD) measurements. ZnO films were prepared using zinc acetate dehydrate (Zn(CH 3 COO) 2 .2H 2 O), ethanol, and diethanolamine (DEA) as a starting material, solvent, and stabilizer, respectively. For doped films, AlCl 3 was added to the mixture. The ZnO:Al films were deposited on a transparent conductive oxide (TCO) substrate using spin coating tecnique at room temperature with a rate of 3000 rpm in 30 sec. The deposited films were annealed at various temperatures from 400 o C to 600 o C during 60 minutes. The transmittance UV-Vis measurement results showed that after annealing at 400 o C, the energy band gap profile of nanocrystalline ZnO:Al film was a blue shift. This indicated that the band gap of ZnO:Al increased after annealing due to the increase of crystalline size. As the annealing temperature increased the bandgap energy was a constant. In addition to this, there was a small oscillation occuring after annealing compared to the as-grown samples. In the case of X-RD measurements, the crystalinity of the films were amorphous before annealing, and after annealing the crystalinity became enhance. Also, X-RD results showed that structure of nanocrystalline ZnO:Al films were hexagonal polycrystalline with lattice parameters are a = 3.290 Å and c = 5.2531 Å.

Electrical, optical and structural properties of transparent conducting Al doped ZnO (AZO) deposited by sol-gel spin coating

“…That's why in this present context AZO film had annealed at 500 0 C and strong diffraction peak has been found at (002) plane in c-axis orientation for all the samples. 8 With increase of film thickness, the value of diffraction angle, 2θ increases slightly from 34.8 0 to 34.99 0 for L-5, L-10, L-15, L-20 samples. This happens due to the reduction of stress in the crystal grain which causes reduction of inter planar spacing.…”

“…To evaluate performance of TCO material an important parameter called figure of merit is used: 16,17 ϕ tc = T 10 R sh (8) Where ϕ tc is the figure of merit and it defines which sample provides better optical and electrical properties for a specific film thickness. T is the optical transmittance at 550 nm and R sh is the sheet resistance.…”