Preparation of copper and tin doped cerium oxide nanoparticles for humidity sensor

Abstract

Metal nanoparticles are highly suitable for sensor applications due to their small size and unique properties. structural and optical properties of the nanoparticles can be tuned with help of doping process that could enable several technological applications such as chemical sensor, ros, biocompatible and anticancer activity. among other nanoparticles, doped cerium oxide nanoparticles have unique properties when compared to undoped cerium oxide nanoparticles. in this work, tin and copper are employed as doping element. literature survey shows that most of the synthetic methods of cerium nanoparticles are difficult and expensive (surfactants are used). the mentioned problem has been solved using simple aqueous route of synthesis without surfactant. we adopted a simple microwave oven method for the preparation of nanoparticles. nanocrystalline undoped and a tin doped cerium oxide nanoparticle has been prepared in different concentration. the obtained results confirm the expected size of nanoparticles along with suitable surface morphology. the formation of nanoparticles exhibits similar structure which is verified by scanning electron microscopy (sem) and transmission electron microscopy (tem). the microscopic results depict that the undoped and doped cerium nanoparticles are shown extremely small size, 4 - 10 nm. infrared analysis demonstrates the bonding variation between undoped and doped cerium nanoparticles. the results confirmed that the prepared materials showed advanced response and an excellent reproducibility of 95%. the copper dopant induces size reduction of nanoparticles which was observed by x-ray diffraction analysis. the effect of nanoparticle size plays significant role in structure and applications such as sensor. size reduction of nanoparticles was seen by using transmission electron microscopic analysis. the particle size effect influences band gap energy of the materials. however, newline