Local structural and sensing properties of TiO2 thin film using the PVD method

This paper studied the structural, morphological, optical, and X-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy (XANES) and sensing properties of titanium dioxide (TiO2) thin film. The TiO2 thin film is prepared in the thin film laboratory on a clean glass plate using a physical vapor deposition (PVD) method. The structural, morphological, Optical, and electronic properties of the fabricated samples are presented by X-ray diffraction (XRD), atomic force microscope (AFM), UV-visible, and XANES. It is found from XRD the crystallite size was ∼25.66 nm with microstrain ∼0.0064 using the Williamson-Hall (W-H) plot. The fractal terms such as grain size, roughness, kurtosis, and skewness were estimated using AFM. The grain size lies in the nanometric range and found that ∼77.21 nm. The band gap of the fabricated film is ∼3.23 eV. The XANES analysis is well supported by XRD measurement and the result found that the fabricated TiO2 thin film was anatase phase. The sensing properties of TiO2 are studied for the detection of Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) concentration (0-5000 ppm) at room temperature. Results found that the TiO2 film is highly sensitive and is the fast response for LPG gas sensors with a maximum sensitivity of ∼198 %.