Synthesis & Study of Properties of Doped ZnO Pellets for Gas Sensing Application

The ZnO and ZnO: Cu Pellets are fabricated by using the Co-Precipitation technique. The effect of different concentration of doping agent on the optical, structural and surface morphological properties of ZnO Pellets were investigated as a function of Cu concentration from 0 to 30 at % in this paper. The spectrophotometric properties of the pellets were carried out for the absorbance and transmittance. The pellets showed absorbance ranging from 0.1-3.0 in UV-VIS regions. The maximum percentage transmittance is 90% within the same region. As the concentration of dopant increases, the pellets become more brittle and the band gap decreases. The XRD pattern reveals the polycrystalline nature of the powder and it is also found that, the lattice spacing is changed with Cu doping in ZnO. This is purely due to distortion of lattice owing to the strain induced by the Cu doping. SEM studies show that, as concentration of copper increases, the porous morphology is vanished giving more dense structure.