Abstract
In this work, a hydrothermal technique is employed to prepare titanium dioxide films on fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) substrates. A low-cost homemade autoclave was used to fabricate iron-doped -TiO2 films (1at. %Fe) at different reaction times from 1 to 4 hours. X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns showed that the predominant phase is rutile (R-TiO2) with peaks at (101), (002), and (112). The XRD results showed that with increasing reaction time the peaks become sharper and narrowed. The images of the field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) showed that with increasing reaction time the films appeared to have vertically aligned TiO2 nanorods. The atomic force microscope (AFM) results illustrated that surface roughness and the root means square was decreased with increasing the reaction time. UV-visible spectroscopy analysis revealed that the energy bandgap value (Eg) decreased with reaction time up to 3 hours. Urbach energy for the grown films was found to be decreased with increasing growth time. The electrical measurements indicated that all TiO2 films had p-type conductivity.
Highlights
Titanium dioxide is one of the important semiconductors that have a wide energy bandgap
The X-ray diffraction (XRD) diffraction technique is used to characterize the phase and crystallinity of 1% Fe-doped TiO2 nanorods with different reaction time (1, 2, and 3 hours) as illustrated in Figure 2 deposited by the hydrothermal deposition method on fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) glass at 180 ̊ C in 20 ml of double-distilled H2O, 20 ml of hydrochloric acid, 0.0121 mg of iron nitrate nonahydrate and 1.022 ml of Titanium butoxide
The XRD patterns display that these films deposited on FTO substrates are tetragonal rutile titanium dioxide (R-TiO2) type
Summary
Titanium dioxide is one of the important semiconductors that have a wide energy bandgap (about 3.1 eV). TiO2 has n-type conductivity [1] It has three structures, namely, anatase, rutile, and brookite. The rutile phase in particular exhibits high hardness and refractive index with good transparency in the visible region. These desired properties increased the importance of this material for optoelectronic applications such as UV detectors [2], solar cells [3], and light-emitting diodes [4]. Its wide bandgap energy results in low light-harvesting efficiency of sunlight because only the ultraviolet light has sufficient energy to support the electron transition from the valence band to the conduction band and this blemish reduces its practical importance in the field of solar cells. We study the effect of growth time on the structural, optical, and electrical properties of TiO2 prepared by the hydrothermal method
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