| dc.description.abstract | Cerium oxide has been subject of numerous studies because of its current and potential uses in supercapacitors, solar cells, self-cleaning glasses and in catalysis. Use of ceria in self-cleaning glass, especially on the solar cells, has been of interest because of its innate hydrophobicity, high transparency and low misfit factor with silicon.
This research work focuses on study and characterization of CeO2 thin films deposited on Si and glass substrates prepared in IFE. For the thin films of CeO2 with different thicknesses on Si, annealing was performed at four different temperatures at 400 ºC, 600 ºC, 800 ºC and 1000ºC for 30 minutes in air and 40 minutes in vacuum. After annealing, for some of the samples, Silicon oil was deposited on their surfaces by placing in oven at 100 ºC overnight. To characterize the structure of the films, different techniques have been incorporated including Raman spectroscopy, polarized Raman spectroscopy (PRS), water contact angel (WCA) measurement, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and X-ray diffraction (XRD).
The results showed that annealing of the coating increased crystallinity and decreased the size of ceria grains. PRS studies demonstrate the polycrystallinity of CeO2 thin films is grown on single crystalline Si substrate. The model calculations were in good agreement with experimental data for single crystal. SEM images provided a good insight on morphology of the grains in the thin film and provided a measure of particle sizes. These results later confirmed by XRD studies and calculations based on acquired XRD patterns regarding the size of the ceria grains which indicated that by increasing the temperature the size of grains increased by increasing crystallinity. XRD tests carried out at UiS were combined with the data from IFE to provide a better picture of the changes in structure with annealing temperature. | |
