Effect of Growth Time on the Structural, Optical and Electrical Properties of the 1%Fe doped TiO2 p-type Synthesized by Hydrothermal Technique

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.