Effect of post-deposition annealing on the properties of ZnO films obtained by high temperature, micro-controller based SILAR deposition

The effect of precursor concentration and post-deposition annealing on the optical and micro-structural properties of SILAR deposited SnO2 films

“…Tin oxide (SnO 2 ) is one of such earth abundant and nontoxic IV-VI material known for its transparency in visible region and a wide bandgap (3.5 to 4.0 eV) [1]. Due to its high absorption co-efficient in UV region and n-type conductivity, SnO 2 has many potential applications such as gas sensors [2], window layers in solar cells, photodetectors [3][4][5] etc The SnO 2 nano materials including thin films have been prepared by several physical and chemical routes such as chemical bath deposition [6], dip coating [7], sol-gel [8], thermal evaporation [9], Spray pyrolysis [10] pulsed laser deposition (PLD) [11], SILAR [12][13][14] etc Among these techniques, SILAR has proved to be a simple and cost-effective route for the synthesis of good quality SnO 2 films as it does not require complex setups and vacuum environment [15]. Several efforts have been made in the past to synthesize SnO 2 using SILAR and other techniques.…”

SILAR Deposition of Metal Oxide Nanostructured Films

“…Another recent study on ZnO films supported the thermally induced grain growth, with the deposited films exhibiting a 26%, 42% and a 50% increase in grain size with increasing annealing temperatures of 200, 300, and 400 °C respectively, without much effect on the morphology of the film (Figure 12a,b). [212] In this case, the bandgap was observed to be in the range 3.1-3.2 eV which seemed to remain unaffected by the annealing temperature, mostly because the samples are well outside the quantum confinement regime. The variation in the bandgap with the annealing temperature could be driven by the annealing-induced modifications such as crystallinity and particle size.…”

Highly c-axis Oriented ZnO Thin Films by Sol-gel Method

“…At rst glance, it is seen there were no cracks at the grain boundary and unannealed samples had a particle size of several nm which means grain formation is almost absent or it is very hard to determine the grains boundary. On the other hand, grain structure and grain boundaries in annealed samples are frankly seen [38]. SEM images show the particle sizes were approximately 20, 20, 50-70, 70-100, and 100-150 nm, which corresponds to 350, 400, 450, 500, and 550 °C post-annealing temperature treatment, respectively.…”