HK Farag, Z M Hanafi, M Dawy and EM Abd El Aziz
Keywords: Zinc oxide, direct precipitation, characterization, band gap
Abstract: The present paper deals with the synthesis of zinc oxide nanoparticles via a direct precipitation method using zinc acetate dihydrate as a precursor. The synthesized ZnO powder was characterized by means of XRD, UV-Visible and IR spectroscopy, SEM-EDX and TG-DTA. The XRD results reveal that the synthesized ZnO has the wurtzite phase structure with a crystallite size of about 50nm. The ZnO particles are spherical in shape and only zinc and oxygen were detected by EDX analysis signifying the high purity of the synthesized ZnO. The UV-Vis. spectrum of the ZnO powder indicates a band gap of about 3.2 eV, showing a slight red shift compared to the band gap of the bulk ZnO (3.37 eV). The prepared ZnO powder exhibits a specific surface area of 16.5 m2 g-1, determined by Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) equation.
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