Optical properties of ZnO nanorods derived from chemical bath deposition process with different seeds solution concentration

Owing to their high surface to volume ratio and fast electron transfer, zinc oxide (ZnO) nanorods have been well-known as potential nanostructured material for various applications including sensors, dye sensitized solar cells, optoelectronic, transparent heater and biomedical devices. Among other synthesizing techniques for obtaining ZnO nanorods, chemical bath deposition (CBD) has been thought as a simple and low-cost method. However, there are several processing parameters that need to be investigated for the above-mentioned applications where the highly optical transparency of thin film ZnO nanorods grown on glass substrates is one of important targets to be achieved. In this work, ZnO nanorods were synthesized through CBD process at low temperature (0°C) by using seed solution prepared by dissolving 1: 1 equimolar zinc nitrate tetrahydrate and hexamethylene tetraamine. For investigation purposes, three different concentration of seed solutions i.e. 0.005, 0.025 and 0.05 M were used. Thin films containing ZnO nanoseeds were formed by spin coating the precursors on the glass substrates, followed with annealing at 200⁰C for 5 minutes. Finally, the ZnO nanorods were further grown at 90°C for 3 hours in the beaker glass using the same solution. Xray diffraction (XRD) analysis showed that all ZnO nanorods demonstrated a strong (002) peak belong to wurtzite phase. It was found that the estimated crystallite size and band gap energy (E_g ) for ZnO nanorods derived from the seed solutions of 0.005, 0.025 and 0.05 M were 21.42, 137.11, 171.39 nm, and 3.60, 3.20, 3.18 eV, respectively. However, the optical transparency was adversely lowered from about 75 to 40 % as a result of increased coverage of ZnO nanorods on the glass substrate. For transparent heater application where, a desired combination of high optical transparency and suitable electronic properties is needed, the current results were considered to be promising.