Síntese e caracterização de nanoestruturas de óxido de zinco para utilização em dispositivos optoeletrônicos orgânicos

Abstract

Nanostructured materials based on ZnO has received considerable interest because of their application in optoelectronic devices. For example, in polymeric solar cell (PSC), due to its low work function, high electron mobility, excellent optical transparency, and environmentally friendly nature, ZnO becomes the most widely used electron transport layer (ETL) in the inverted PSCs. This work aims at providing an insight in the parameters that determine the morphology of ZnO nanoparticles and their influence onto inverted solar cells based on ZnO and P3HT/PCBM. First, ZnO nanoparticles were synthesized by hydrolysis and condensation of zinc acetate dihydrate by polyol route (with and without water addition during the synthesis) or using NaOH. Then, X-ray diffraction (XRD), infrared and photoluminescence spectroscopies, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) were employed to study the chemical characteristic and the morphology of the ZnO. XRD results showed that the nanoparticles obtained were composed of hexagonal wurtzite phase. FT-IR spectra peak at 435 cm-1 indicated characteristic vibrational band of ZnO and at 3380, 1643 and 1102 cm-1 the vibrational transitions of the polyol, suggesting that the polyol is bonded to the oxide surface. The photoluminescence spectra of the ZnO samples, which were synthesized at different conditions, showed the same behavior, indicating that the defects states in the oxide could be due zinc and oxygen vacancies. The morphology is dependent on the polyol employed in the synthesis. For the samples synthesized with ethylene glycol (EG) was observed that the morphology change from nanoparticle to nanorods with the addition of water in the synthesis. The data of relative XRD peak intensity ratio of I002/I100 suggest the preferred c-axis oriented growth for the rod-shaped ZnO particles compared to the equiaxial particles. A hexagonal and a “flake” structure were observed for the ZnO synthesized using polyethylene glycol (PEG300) and NaOH, respectively. PSCs were built for all samples of ZnO synthesized and the best result was obtained with ZnO synthesized with NaOH. This result may be due to the better packaging of the ZnO layer, facilitating the electron transport.