Abstract
Zinc oxide (ZnO) offers a great potential in several applications from sensors to Photovoltaic cells thanks to the material’s dependency, to its optical and electrical properties and crystalline structure architypes. Typically, ZnO powder tends to be grown in the form of a wurtzite structure allowing versatility in the phase of material growths; albeit, whereas in this work we introduce an alternative in scalable yet relatively simple 2D hexagonal planed ZnO nanoflakes via the electrochemical deposition of commercially purchased Zn(NO3)2 and KCl salts in an electrochemical process. The resulting grown materials were analyzed and characterized via a series of techniques prior to thermal annealing to increase the grain size and improve the crystal quality. Through observation via scanning electron microscope (SEM) images, we have analyzed the statistics of the grown flakes’ hexagonal plane’s size showing a non-monotonal strong dependency of the average flake’s hexagonal flakes’ on the annealing temperature, whereas at 300 °C annealing temperature, average flake size was found to be in the order of 300 μm2. The flakes were further analyzed via transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to confirm its hexagonal planes and spectroscopy techniques, such as Raman Spectroscopy and photo luminescence were applied to analyze and confirm the ZnO crystal signatures. The grown materials also underwent further characterization to gain insights on the material, electrical, and optical properties and, hence, verify the quality of the material for Photovoltaic cells’ electron collection layer application. The role of KCl in aiding the growth of the less preferable (0001) ZnO is also investigated via various prospects discussed in our work. Our method offers a relatively simple and mass-producible method for synthesizing a high quality 2D form of ZnO that is, otherwise, technically difficult to grow or control.
Highlights
Zinc oxide (ZnO) has been widely studied as a platform for a broad spectrum of applications
The list includes pulse laser deposition (PLD) [35], commercial Simonkolleite annealing [36], In growing h-ZnO, there have been reports regarding the success of the growths via various hydrothermal method [37], and electrochemical depositions (ECD) [9,28,30,31,33,34,41]
The growth conditions are set to be similar to work conducted by Pradhan et al.; initially, the bath’s room temperature, the bath is preheated until the temperature is at an equilibrium at 45 °C as electrolyte is first mixed with 0.04 M of Zn(NO3 )2 and 0.1 M of KCl in deionized water (DI) at room read by the DS18b20 waterproof thermal sensor
Summary
ZnO has been widely studied as a platform for a broad spectrum of applications. Thanks to the material’s widely variable electrical and optical properties, based on its nanostructure types or effective planes align, the material can be a strong candidate for biosensing [1], ultraviolet lasing [2], varistor [3], catalysts [4], optoelectronic devices [5] and, more importantly, photovoltaic cells [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. ZnO growth in bulk, nanodots, sonochemical method [26,27], andthe electrochemical deposition [28,29,30,31].of ZnO have remained relatively forms through various techniques, 2-dimensional formats. The list includes pulse laser deposition (PLD) [35], commercial Simonkolleite annealing [36], In growing h-ZnO, there have been reports regarding the success of the growths via various hydrothermal method [37], and electrochemical depositions (ECD) [9,28,30,31,33,34,41]. Grown via so ECD, up by been thermal to maximize growth and improve aspect in the report listed far,followed there have noannealing methods that can the grow atomically thinthe with a high ratio prior to further optoelectrical investigations.
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