Abstract
Aluminum-doped zinc oxide ceramics with yttria doping (AZO:Y) ranging from 0 to 0.2 wt.% were fabricated by pressureless sintering yttria-modified nanoparticles in air at 1,300°C. Scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction analysis, a physical property measurement system, and a densimeter were employed to characterize the precursor nanoparticles and the sintered AZO ceramics. It was shown that a small amount of yttria doping can remarkably retard the growth of the as-received precursor nanoparticles, further improve the microstructure, refine the grain size, and enhance the density for the sintered ceramic. Increasing the yttria doping to 0.2 wt.%, the AZO:Y nanoparticles synthetized by a coprecipitation process have a nearly sphere-shaped morphology and a mean particle diameter of 15.1 nm. Using the same amount of yttria, a fully dense AZO ceramic (99.98% of theoretical density) with a grain size of 2.2 μm and a bulk resistivity of 4.6 × 10−3 Ω·cm can be achieved. This kind of AZO:Y ceramic has a potential to be used as a high-quality sputtering target to deposit ZnO-based transparent conductive films with better optical and electrical properties.
Highlights
Transparent conductive oxides (TCO) as transparent electrodes have been widely used in thin-film solar cells and flat panel display devices [1,2]
Sintering of AZO:Y ceramics The as-received AZO:Y nanoparticles were first granulated by spray drying to form larger sphere aggregations with a diameter of approximately 10 μm and were pressed by uniaxial pressing (50 MPa, 3 min) in a stainless steel die with a diameter of 8 cm
The SEM images of the unmodified (Figure 1a) and different amounts of yttria-modified AZO (Figure 1b,c,d) nanoparticles after calcination at 600°C for 2 h as well as the plot (Figure 1e) of particle sizes estimated from the SEM images as a function of yttria content are shown
Summary
Transparent conductive oxides (TCO) as transparent electrodes have been widely used in thin-film solar cells and flat panel display devices [1,2]. The magnetron-sputtering ceramic target is one of the most widely used methods for AZO film deposition [3]. The target plays a major role in achieving high-quality films [4,5,6,7]. The target for sputtering TCO films should have a high density, finer grain size, and better conductance [7,8,9,10,11], which will be helpful for avoiding the formation of nodules to
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