Original Articles
Hammad R Humud, Saba J Kadhem
Abstract
The aim of this work is to synthesis of pure γ- CuI nanoparticles, by employing adaptation of the exploding wire phenomena in needle-plate geometry. γ- CuI p-type semiconductor is one of the promising materials it has a wide energy bad gap (3.1 eV) and unusual optical properties. It is very useful as hole collector in dye sensitized solar cells and also it is an important non-linear optical material. High purity Cu wire, 0.3 mm in diameter, is exploded against a Cu plate held at 50V with respect to the wire achieving a current of 100 amp. These explosions are carried out in a reactor vessel containing 3gm of I dissolved in 100 cm3 distilled water under ultrasonic stirring. The aqueous solution generates iodine ions and Cu+1 ions are created by the explosion react with the I-1 ions present in the chamber and produce CuI nanoparticles. Various characterization techniques were employed to study the properties of these CuI nanoparticles the structural by X-ray diffraction (XRD) technique, the elemental analysis by EDX analysis, optical absorption by UV-Vis spectrophotometer, Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopic analysis was done with FT-IR spectrometer, fluorimeter were used to record fluorescent behavior, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) for the nanoparticles microstructure. All the characterization techniques confirmed that the synthesis material was pure and single phase γ- CuI. From this work it can be conclude that the exploding wire in needle-plate geometry proved to be easy and inexpensive method for the synthesis pure and single phase γ- CuI nanoparticles.