Study of thin Films of Nickel Oxide (NiO) Deposited by the Spray Pyrolysis Method

Antar Bouhank, Youcef. Bellal and Hacene Serrar 1. Research Center in Industrial Technologies (CRTI) P.O. Box 64Cheraga, Algiers 16014, Algeria 2. Laboratory of Chemical Process Engineering (LCPE), Faculty of technology, Ferhat ABBAS Setif-1 University, Setif 19000 Algeria Abstract: In this work, thin films of nickel oxide (NiO) were deposited by a simple and inexpensive technique, which is spray pyrolysis on ordinary glass substrates heated to a fixed temperature of 500 °C, from a solution containing nickel nitrate hexahydrate as a precursor dissolved in distilled water with deferent values of concentrations. The NiO thin films obtained were characterized to determine the structure with X-ray diffraction technique (XRD), the absorption domain (UV-Visible Spectroscopy), and the surface morphology (SEM). The X-ray diffraction patterns confirm the presence of NiO phase with preferential orientation along the (111) direction. The optical gap for nickel oxide calculated with a concentration of 0.1 M from the measurement of optical absorption is 3.6 eV, which is quite comparable to the value of the ratio.