In previous years, the investigation of new materials for photovoltaic applications was dependent and related to the experimental and modelling parameters of any properties. Nickel oxide was obtained to belong in the group of semiconductor materials and is one of the best materials at present because of its good properties [1].
Nickel oxide (NiO) is a semiconductor material with a nature of p-type, which belonged to the part of TCO family. This attribute of NiO has several potential applications, for example, it is used in the gas sensors due to its band gap energy in the range of 3.6−4.0 eV and for the organic solar cells applications due to its p-type semiconducting [2]. It can be used in transparent diodes and even in the transparent transistors caused by the best optical transmission and electrical conductivity. Moreover, NiO can be used for defrosting windows due to its good conductivity, and fabricated NiO can be used in the UV photodetectors and touch screens due to its good responsivity [3, 4].
In the present article, we have studied and investigated a relationship to calculate the crystallite size (
The NiO samples were fabricated on the glass substrates using a pneumatic spray technique with 0.1 M of the precursor molarity. The NiO thin films were deposited at several deposition temperatures in the range of 380–460°C [5] (see Table 1).
The diffraction angle 2θ, the full width at half-maximum (FWHM), the crystallite size G, the lattice parameter a and a − a0 of (111) diffraction peak for NiO thin films at several deposition temperatures [5].
380 | 37.80 | 0.00766 | 19.13 | 0.4122281 | 0.00537184 |
400 | 37.67 | 0.00781 | 18.74 | 0.4135872 | 0.00401271 |
420 | 37.64 | 0.00868 | 16.88 | 0.4138530 | 0.00374695 |
440 | 37.60 | 0.00799 | 18.31 | 0.4143484 | 0.00325152 |
460 | 37.66 | 0.00707 | 20.72 | 0.4136507 | 0.00394921 |
Table 1 presents that the NiO thin films were nanocrystalline and had a cubic structure with (111) crystal plane at the higher intensity, which has preferential a-axis orientation along with (111) crystal plane.
The Miller indices (
The lattice parameter
The differences
In this article, we have estimated the crystallite size (
The crystallite size G experimental and correlated at several deposition temperatures.
380 | 19.13 | 19.14 |
400 | 18.74 | 18.84 |
420 | 16.88 | 16.96 |
440 | 18.31 | 18.45 |
460 | 20.72 | 20.82 |
Figure 1 shows the variation of the experimental and fitting of the crystallite size at several deposition temperatures in the range of 380–460°C. The measured values of the crystallite sizes were obtained using Eq. (5), which were given in Table 2. This correlation indicated that the crystallite sizes of the NiO thin films can be predominantly influenced by the FWHM
The variation of the crystallite size G experimental and fitting at several deposition temperatures.
The variation of the crystallite size G experimental and fitting at several FWHM values.
In this article, the direct correlation of the crystallite size from the experimental values was investigated by a fitting model wherein the calculated crystallite size of the pure NiO thin films was detected in the structural parameters, such as the FWHM