Effect of Sr-doping on sinterability, morphology, structure, photocatalytic activity and AC conductivity of ZnO ceramics

Subsolidus phase equilibria of the CuO – SrO – ZnO pseudoternary system in air at 900 °C

“…However, the lattice constants of ZnO show a nonmonotonic behavior versus doping level, with the c-axis parameter first decreasing before increasing. On the other hand, Das et al [15] (solid-state reaction at 1100 °C) observed a broadening of some ZnO XRD peaks at low Sr doping level and concluded that two distinct ZnO phases with different lattice constants coexist. Besides the fact that processing condicitons may induce different metastable situations, it is worth mentioning that the relatively low signal-to-noise ratio in the XRD patterns of the thin film samples [12,13] makes the detection of low intensity impurity peaks difficult, while some high intensity XRD reflections of SrZnO 2 have a near overlap with several ZnO reflections.…”

“…For the Zn 0.99 Sr 0.01 O 2 nominal composition, the lattice parameters are unchanged within the standard deviation, whereas for Zn 0.99 Cu 0.01 O 2 , a slight decrease of the c-axis length seems to take place. The possibility of introducing Sr into the zincite structure has been explored within various contexts such as modification of the optical and electrical properties of ZnO [12,13], improving its photocatalytic properties [14,15], or using SrO as a sintering aid [15,16].…”

“…Besides the fact that processing condicitons may induce different metastable situations, it is worth mentioning that the relatively low signal-to-noise ratio in the XRD patterns of the thin film samples [12,13] makes the detection of low intensity impurity peaks difficult, while some high intensity XRD reflections of SrZnO 2 have a near overlap with several ZnO reflections. The latter fact may partly be responsible for the reported behavior of the ZnO c-axis parameter upon Sr doping [12,13,15]. In any case, there is a clear need for more systematic investigations in order to assess the actual solubility of Sr in ZnO and its dependence on processing parameters.…”

“…However, Zn being not magnetic, it represents a favo rable case for high-temperature superconductors. Furthermore, the use of ZnO in association with SrO or CuO for various applications [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] as well as that of SrZnO 2 as a catalyst for PET depolymerization under microwave irradiation [20] or as host material for red or blue emitting phosphors [21,22] make the study of this system interesting in view of optimizing the processing parameters of samples aimed at various technological applications. The equilibration conditions for the present study (air atmosphere and 900 °C) correspond to conditions similar to those used for the synthesis of various high temperature superconductors [23,24].…”

Effect of Milling Time, Doping Concentration and Temperature on the Structural, Microstructural and Optical Properties of Cu Doped ZnO Nanoceramics

“…The structural parameters of 10h milled Zn 1-x Cu x O samples obtained from the Rietveld re nement of the X-ray diffraction pattern using fullprof software [32] was shown in Figure 8(a-f), where as Figure 9(a-f) shows the structural parameter of calcined (900ºC) samples. The change in lattice parameter 'a' and 'c' with different Copper concentration were given in Figure 8(a).…”