Synthesis and Characterization of Doped Zinc Oxide2020

Abstract

ZnO possesses wurtzite hexagonal structure and space group P63mc. By nature it’s an n-type conductor due to its native defects. The source of n-type conductivity is still a great debate. The defects are the most suggested reason for the n-type behavior of ZnO. ZnO has a lot of applications in lasing, LEDs, piezoelectric transducers, varistors, sunscreens, solar cells, photo catalysis, medicine and food industry. Its anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties are employed in medicine and food preservation respectively. For doping and making composites bottom up approach is followed. In this work ‘Hydrothermal method’ which is a bottom up approach, is used to synthesize the nanoparticles. Particles of various sizes and shapes can be obtained by small change in precursor amount, temperature, pressure and pH. A lot of variety in nanostructures can be achieved that have usage in fields of bio-photonics, bio-medical, electronics and optoelectronics etc. It involves simple apparatus and also helps in producing core shell nanostructures. Zinc Oxide hexagonal nanoparticles have been synthesized in this work using SDS and PVP as capping agents. The samples were prepared for different ratio of capping agents and then doping of Al, Mn, Li and Ag with 1%, 2% and 5% in 1:1 sample. Among all, the best results were of 1% doping samples so results for only 1% (with 1:1 of the capping agents) are reported here. For analysis of all the samples various characterizations i.e. XRD, SEM, EDS, FTIR and UV-DRS were done. The information about structure, crystallite size and lattice parameters was obtained by XRD analysis. The morphology and composition was known through SEM and EDS. The functional groups was studied through FTIR and finally band gap was determined by UV-DRS. All the synthesized particles can be studied for anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties.