Effect of thickness and annealing temperature on the structural properties of CuO thin films prepared by sol-gel spin coating technique

Abstract

In this work, CuO thin films were deposited by sol gel spin-coating technique on microscope glass substrates. Copper acetatewas used as the starting salt material source, ethanol as solvent and monoethanolamine as stabiliser. The as-coated films werepreheated at 300 oC for 10 min and then annealed using two different temperatures. As the annealing temperature wasincreased from 500 oC to 600 oC, along with thickness, an improvement of the structural properties was concluded from XRDand SEM analyses. I-V characteristics of the films corroborated this result and showed existence of a normal Ohmic behaviourof these films. The average crystallite size estimated from XRD analysis was found to increase from 28.06 to 37.68 nm withthe increase of both thickness and annealing temperature. On the other hand, the two parameters dislocation density andstrain followed an opposite trend and decreased from 1.27 to 0.704 (1015 lines /m2) and from 1.29 × 10−3 to 0.961 × 10−3,respectively