Sharif Digital Repository

Textile industry wastewaters are one of the important sources of environmental contamination because they produce large quantities of highly colored effluents. In recent years, use of advanced oxidation processes by producing highly active and reactive components such as hydroxyl radicals has been proposed. In this study, two oxygenated photocatalytic systems including UV/ZnO and UV/TiO2 were examined for degradation of C.I. reactive orange 16 dye as a typical organic pollutant in textile effluents. A thin gap annular photoreactor was designed and applied for the experiments. The photoreactor provided large surface area exposed to UV light, where in the solution layer renewal on the UV... 

Hexavalent chromium ion (Cr+6) is a very toxic type of heavy metal in industrial effluents which is not biodegradable and accumulates in the human body that can cause genetic mutations and cancer. The aim of this project is to investigate the effect of wavelength and intensity of appropriate light on the reaction rate of photocatalytic reduction of Cr+6 ion to less toxic materials. In this project, we first designed and constructed a photocatalytic reactor to investigate the effect of wavelength and intensity of incident light on the reaction rate. The home-made photocatalytic reactor consisted of 120 LEDs in 12 different wavelengths, which has ability to control the intensity and... 

Fighting contagious microbial diseases is considered a serious health issue, which has attracted much attention in worldwide. Thus, development of new materials based on nanostructures as a new generation of antibiotics to address this challenge has been of interest to researchers in recent years. Nanostructures based on metallic oxide semiconductors such as oxides with light absorption, production of electron-hole pairs in needle like structures cause tearing bacterial membrane and eventually destroy the bacterium. To this end, we designed experiments to study mechanism and physics governing the process of bacterial degradation to determine the best conditions for inhibiting bacteria... 

The purpose of this study is the fabrication and characterization of ZnO nano particles and the application of ZnO in solar cells. Therefore, firstly we fabricate the high stable solution of ZnO nano particles and then characterize ZnO nano particles. In addition, we study sulfurzation and selenization of zinc oxide thin films. We use ZnO nano particles for fabrication of transparent conductive films. Transparent conductive films have many applications such as touch panels, displays and solar cells. The most applicable transparent conductive electrode is indium tin oxide , which is the most expensive layer in solar cells. But silver nanowires has some challenges such as high surface... 

According to the growth in the world population and the decrease in fossil fuels resources and also according to the pollution caused by these unrenewable resources, using hydrogen as an alternative energy resource seems to be unavoidable. In the past decades, semi-conductor metal oxides were being used widely in the energy domain of study, due to their appropriate band gap in the ultra-violet and visible spectra. Among these metal oxides, ZnO has been under special attention because of its electron mobility and its reasonable production cost and also its friendliness to environment. But the high band gap of ZnO (3.2 eV) has impeded its use in visible light spectrum. In this project,... 

In this research, two type of graphene quantum dots (GQDs) have synthesized including, normal GQDs and nitrogen-doped GQDs (N-GQDs). Then, each of GQDs were deposited on the 1 dimensional zinc oxide (ZnO) nanostructures namely nanowires (NWs) and branched hierarchical (BH) systems. Then, photocatalytic activity of the samples were studied in photodegradation of methylene blue (MB) and methylene orange (MO) under visible light. First, ZnO nanowires (ZnO NWs) were fabricated by anodization of zinc sheet possessing wurtzite crystal structure with their average length and diameter measured in the range of 50-60 μm and 170-300 nm, respectively. Then, normal GQDs were synthesized by... 

In this study, transparent conductive thin film of Aluminum doped ZnO (ZnO:Al) have been fabricated thorough RF sputtering. The main goal of fabrication of these layers is achieving thin films with minimum resistivity and maximum optical transparency in visible range of spectrum employing as transparent electrodes and buffer layer at the entirely oxidized solar cells. To achieve the suitable structure, various parameters including pressure, power and the thickness of the deposition and annealing on morphologies of thin film has been investigated. According to these results, thin film of ZnO:Al has the transparency of 80% in the visible light range . Doping of ZnO with Aluminum caused... 

Because of the working conditions of semiconductors at ambient temperature and pressure, degradation of organic pollutants through semiconductors photocatalysis has attracted the interest of many researchers. Because of its large exciton binding energy,high chemical and physical stability,high electron and hole mobility, and low cost; zinc oxide, an n-type semiconductor with 3.2 eV direct band gap, is widely used in applications such as photocatalysts, solar cells, and light-emitting diodes. Among various morphologies of ZnO, 1D nanostructures such as nanowires and nanorods have recieved much attention due to their high surface to volume ratio. However, the application of ZnO as a... 

Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) are one of the main subjects of research in the organic electronic advanced technology. There are many advantages for OLEDs like self-emitting, high efficiency, wide vision angle, high contrast, and rapid response time. The main challenge in this area is the long-time stability of performance in air ambiance. Although the encapsulation process could overcome the instability problem, it increases the final cost. In this project, metal oxides have been utilized for the injection of electrons and holes in hybrid light emitting diodes (HyLEDs). In the first stage, inverted structure of HyLEDs with ZnO and MgxZn1-xO layers was fabricated and characterized.... 

In this project, the photoelectrochemical properties of ZnO nanostructures modified by CdS and Graphene was studied. Firs, titanium foil was cut into rectangular shape with 1cm width and 3 cm length, cleaned by rinsing in acetone and ethanol and annealed at 4000C for an hour. As a result, a thin layer of titanium oxide was formed on Ti sheet. Then a layer of grapheme oxide was deposited on substrate using Electrophoretic deposition (EPD). After that, ZnO nanostructure was deposited on the TiO2 substrate using Electropulsation (EP) with 20 consecutive pulse followed by 3 minutes Electrodeposition (ED). Using SEM analysis, the morphology of ZnO was determined to be nanopetals in which the... 

The purpose of this project is to construct a gas sensor based on one-dimensional nanostructured electrodes of copper oxide. By creating of these nanostructures, can be reduced breakdown voltage of gases, including flammable, to a few hundred volts. The CuO nanowires were grown by thermal oxidation on copper substrate to form self-assembled. In this method, by heating the copper foil,Cu2O also was formed on substrate. Effects of surface tension of substrate and oxidation temperature on surface density and structure of the nanowires were studied. SEM images taken from the samples showed that the surface tensions increases the density of nanowires and increasing the oxidation temperature leads... 

In this thesis, first, random lasing in a three dimensional disordered medium has been simulated using FDTD method and some properties of random lasers which were observed by others in the previous experiments have theoretically been shown. Our simulation results show that when the density of particles increases to an upper limit, the intensity of lasing modes is enhanced. Also, the effects of pumping rate and particle size on the number of lasing modes and their intensity are studied. Lasing threshold of laser modes in different disordered systems is calculated and it is shown that by an appropriate selection of the central frequency of gain line-shape, the output power intensity of random... 

ZnO semiconductor has a wide band gap (3.3eV) and high electron mobility, making it a possible candidate for an effective structure-based Dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) semiconductor. Efficiency of DSSC based on ZnO is lower than TiO2 due to its low chemical satability. It is well known that the energy conversion efficiency of DSSC depends on the electron transport in the photoelectrode so in this investigation we fabricated high transport photoelectrode by doping Al in ZnO nanostructures. DSSC based on Al doped and undoped ZnO nanosheet synthesized by electrochemical deposition. Current density-voltage (J-V) characterizations indicate that Al-doping in ZnO crystal structure increases... 

Synthesis, characterization and photocatalytic applications of core-shell like ZnO@CdS nanorods have been studied in this research. The synthesis of core-shell like ZnO@CdS nanorods was carried out in three different steps. At first, ZnO seed layer was formed on glass substrate via sol-gel process under optimum conditions using absolute ethanol solution containing zinc acetate and a stabilizer ( either Monoethanolamine (MEA) or diethanolamine (DEA)). When MEA used as stabilizer, the optimum concentration of sol was found 0.2 M, while increasing the sol concentration caused the seed layer to be grown in a string-like structure. The RMS surface roughness of seed layer prepared by 0.2 M sol... 

ZnO is a wide and direct band gap (3.37 eV) semiconducting material with a large exciton binding energy (60 meV). It has been extensively studied in the last few years owing to its potential applications in various fields such as surface acoustic wave devices (SAW), transparent electrode, solar cell windows, photovoltaic devices, gas sensors and photoelectrochemical cells. Recently, much attention has been paid to rare-earth (RE) doped ZnO for possible applications in visible emitting phosphors in displays, high power lasers, and other optoelectronic devices. In this thesis, initially ZnO thin films were deposited on glass and ITO substrates using sol-gel dip-coating method. Optical and... 

Photocatalysts are compounds that can perform oxidation and reductions in the presence of light. One of the most known applications for photocatalyst is degrading organic contaminants in wastewater and making them harmless to the environment.In this project, a magnetic photocatalyst based on Fe3O4@ZnO/N-RGO has been synthesized and characterized with FT-IR, FE-SEM and EDS, XRD, and TGA. Moreover, photocatalytic dye degradation reactions for Rhodamine B, Methylene Blue, and Methyl Orange have been investigated and compared in the presence of Fe3O4@ZnO/N-RGO, Fe3O4@ZnO/RGO, Fe3O4@ZnO, and ZnO. Furthermore, the performance of the photocatalyst has been studied for 5 consecutive reactions and... 

In this research, the synthesis of the electrospum nano fiber doped zinc oxide and its photocatalyst usage was investigated. The band gap of the zinc oxide in the area of UV leads to deactivation of this material at the visible light. With due the attention to sunny weather in Iran and the fact that about 50 percentage of sunlight is visible light, producing and usage of catalyst materials actived at visible light is economical. Doping is one of the ways of activating ZnO at visible light, so in this research thiourea is used as the source of ZnO doping. The results of the expriments done at visible light and also spectrums of DRS, XPS and XRD prove that the doping is happened. Also, in this... 

Herein, we report an efficient one-pot four-component reaction of commercially available 1,3-dicarbonyl compounds, aromatic aldehydes, amines, and nitromethane in the presence of ZnO nanoparticles, which leads to highly substituted pyrroles in moderate to good yields. A mild and efficient tandem process for the synthesis of highly substituted α-pyrones starting from 2-arylacetic acid of high com-mercial availability has been developed. The synthesis is based on the Knoevenagel condensation of 1,3-cyclohexadiones to various β-keto-Esters, followed by lactonization in the presence of 20 mol% ZnO as a nanocatalyst. Moderate to high yields, easily available and less expensive starting materials... 

The present work is based on the, synthesis and investigation of photocatalytic activity of TiO2, TiO2/MWCNT, ZnO and ZnO/MWCNT nanostructures. The nanostructures were prepared using multi-walled carbonnanotubes (MWCNT) as templates.The SEM images of TiO2 and ZnO nanoparticles and TiO2/MWCNT andZnO/MWCNT showed that nanosize TiO2 and ZnO particles homogeneously and densely supported on the surfaces of multiwall carbon nanotubes the photocatalytic activity of the TiO2, TiO2 /MWCNT, ZnO and ZnO/MWCNT was examined by the degradation of Basic Blue 41(BB41) under UV and Vis lights. The optimum conditions for degradation of BB41 on TiO2 where found to be: calcination temperature (450 °C), dye... 

Zinc oxide(ZnO) nanoparticles have been used in a wide-ranging of applications such as transparent UV protection, medical treatments, light emitting diodes, sensors and photovoltaic cells. Many applications of ZnO nanoparticles could be improved by changing the particle size, shape and morphology. In order to take advantage of the unique size dependent properties observed for ZnO anoparticles, knowledge of how particle growth can be controlled is required. As an alternative to transmittance electron microscopy (TEM), which is already used in the study of size and monodispersity of ZnO nanoparticles during synthesis, we proposed a simple spectrophotometric method coupled with chemometric...