Abstract
Aluminum-doped zinc oxide film was deposited on a glass substrate by mist chemical vapor deposition method. The influence of different aluminum doping ratios on the structural and optical properties of zinc oxide film was investigated. The XRD results revealed that the diffraction peak of (101) crystal plane was the dominant peak for the deposited AZO films with the Al doping ratios increasing from 1 wt % to 3 wt %. It was found that the variation of AZO film structures was strongly dependent on the Al/Zn ratios. The intertwined nanosheet structures were obtained when Zn/O ratios were greater than Al/O ratios with the deposition temperature of 400 °C. The optical transmittance of all AZO films was greater than 80% in the visible region. The AZO film deposited with Al doping ratio of 2 wt % showed the highest photocatalytic efficiency between the wavelength of 475 nm and 700 nm, with the high first-order reaction rate of 0.004 min−1 under ultraviolet radiation. The mechanism of the AZO film influenced by aluminum doping ratio during mist chemical vapor deposition process was revealed.
Highlights
In the last decade, the photocatalytic process has been mainly involved in the degradation of chemical pollutants and hazardous industrial waste [1,2]
Many popular metal oxides have been applied as semiconductor photocatalysts, including magnesium oxide, titanium dioxide (TiO2 ), silver oxide, copper (II) oxide and zinc oxide (ZnO), due to their excellent physical and chemical properties [8,9,10,11,12,13]
The AFM images of aluminum-doped ZnO (AZO) films deposited with different Al doping ratios by the mist
Summary
The photocatalytic process has been mainly involved in the degradation of chemical pollutants and hazardous industrial waste [1,2]. The faster recombination rate of photogenerated electron-hole pairs can reduce the photocatalytic efficiency of ZnO. It was reported that the recombination rate of electron-hole pairs could be reduced by modifying the surface, introducing the defects or doping with transition metals in ZnO [20,21,22,23,24]. Aluminum (Al) doping is expected to be a more efficient method of reducing the electron-hole pairs recombination rate of ZnO [25,26,27]. It was reported that mist CVD had advantages on the film deposition such as high uniformity, high reproducibility, simplicity, easy to control, and low cost [34,35,36,37]. We planned to apply the mist CVD method to synthesize aluminum-doped ZnO (AZO) thin film. The effect of Al doping ratios on the properties of films was investigated, and the photocatalytic activity of AZO films was investigated as well
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