Influence of heat treatment on the properties of tin oxide nanoparticles: A potential material for environmental remediation applications

Metal oxides have gained a growing interest in the field of material science owing to their size and shape dependent physiochemical properties. Tin oxide (SnO2) is considered as a multifaceted material with its widespread applications such as oxidation catalysis, energy harvesting, bio-imaging, gas sensing, storage devices and many more. This study reports the synthesis of SnO2 nanoparticles derived via sol-gel route. To observe the effect of thermal treatment on the grown material, the samples were subjected to calcination at different temperature ranging from 350 °C to 550 °Cfor about 4 hrs. The structural, compositional, morphological and optical properties of Tin oxide were studied by XRD, EDAX, FESEM, and UV-Vis spectroscopic analysis respectively. The XRD pattern consists only SnO2 peaks with preferred orientation along (110) plane. The crystallite size increases with higher calcination temperature and is found in the range of 3-15 nm. All the peaks corresponding to SnO2 matches with the standard data indicating the growth of good quality single phase material. Compositional data reveals that that grown material manifested in required stoichiometric ratio of SnO. Scanning electron micrographs show uniform growth of SnO2 nanoparticles with particle size ranging from 10-20 nm. The energy band gap of the SnO2 calculated by optical studies was 3.1eV and 3.0 eV for 450 °Cand 550 °Crespectively. The calculated band gap lies in the visible region of the solar spectrum which could be beneficial for the enhanced photocatalytic performance of the SnO2 nanoparticles.