Key factors affecting facile growth of two precursor-based seedless vertical ZnO nanorods for haptic sensing and energy harvesting applications

Rehan Ahmed, Pramod Kumar

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Growth of vertical and well-aligned Zinc Oxide nanorods is required due to their high piezoelectric coefficient d 33 along the c-axis for the development of biocompatible haptic sensors and energy harvesting devices. The seedless hydrothermal method using minimum precursors can provide a low-cost, less complex, and large-area application solution for the development of ZnO nanorods. In this study, a simple two precursor-based seedless hydrothermal method is optimized for vertical growth. Experimental results show the most important factors responsible for vertical growth are temperature, concentration, initial waiting time of solution, and substrate morphology. Strong concentration-dependent vertical growth is observed at a fixed optimum temperature of 90 °C which resulted in optimum verticality and density of ZnO nanorods at 160 mM precursor concentration with the growth density and aspect ratio of 112 ± 3 nanorods per 100 µm2 and 9.7, respectively. The second factor is the solution waiting time before placing the substrate in the solution contributed to verticality due to the dependence of initial seed nanocrystal size on nucleation. It is observed that the fresh solution has smaller seed nanocrystals that can attach to the substrate resulting in vertical nanorods. The third factor is the morphology of the substrate which is modified using vacuum annealing to create larger cavities in between the grains and hence increasing the vertical nucleation. The optimized parameters for the growth of vertically aligned ZnO nanorods are used to fabricate devices, and a piezoelectric voltage of 17 mV is recorded at an applied force of 35 kPa.

Original languageEnglish
Article number2123
JournalJournal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics
Volume34
Issue number31
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2023
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Funding

This study was funded by Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) Government of India project fund SERB No: EEQ/2020/000301; Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) the seed Grant No. RD/0518-IRCCSH0-023. The authors would like to thank the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) for the seed grant and the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) Government of India for funding. Rehan Ahmed would like to also thank the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Government of India for providing the fellowship.

FundersFunder number
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India
Science and Engineering Research BoardEEQ/2020/000301
Indian Institute of Technology BombayRD/0518-IRCCSH0-023

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