Preparations of TiO₂/SiO₂ composite thin films for solar applications

Abstract

In this study, TiO₂/SiO₂ composite thin film was used as the material to study this research. There are many methods to prepare TiO₂/SiO₂ composite thin film that used in solar applications such as sol-gel method, RF magnetron sputtering method, chemical vapour deposition (CVD) method and electron beam evaporation method. But, in this project, the method preparation of TiO₂/SiO₂ composite thin film is specified to sol-gel method. Besides that, there are two types method of coating that can be used to coating the solution to the precursors or substrate which are dip coating and spin coating. The most suitable method of coating used is spin coating method due to their benefits by using glass slide as the precursors or substrate. The X-ray Diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and UV-Visible spectrometer were used to analyses the morphology and crystal structure, identified the phase, and analyse the photocatalytic activity respectively. Based on the result obtained, sample annealed at 300℃ was the most better sample that successfully prepared by using sol-gel method compared to another samples.