SYNTHESIS AND CHARACTERIZATION OF ADHESION ENERGY OF COPPER OXIDE NANOSTRUCTURES WITH COPPER SUBSTRATE

Abstract

Copper oxide (CuO) nanostructures find applications in diverse areas ranging from high Tc superconductors, field emitters, catalysts, gas sensors, magnetic storage, biosensors, super-hydrophobic surfaces, energy materials etc. because these have large surface area and CuO is a p type narrow bandgap (1.2-1.5 eV) semiconductor. In all these applications, structural stability of the nanostructures is very important for efficient functioning of devices with longer lifetime. Hence, it is necessary to assess the growth mechanism of these nanostructures so as to study variation in adhesion energies of various nanostructures with their substrate. In this research work, different morphologies of nanostructures of copper oxide were synthesized on copper foil substrate by only changing the reagent concentration under the same process conditions and thereafter, these were subjected to nano-scratch test to quantify the adhesion energies. The adhesion energy calculated was highest for nanorods and lowest for nanoribbons among the morphologies obtained in this work. The result was correlated with the growth mechanism of different nanostructures. The output of this research work can be put to use in improving the lifetime as well as the efficiency of CuO nanostructure-based devices and these synthesis and characterisation methods can be employed in studying other transition metal oxide nanostructures as well.