CRYSTALLIZATION, DENSIFICATION, OPTICAL PROPERTIES AND BIOACTIVE APPLICATIONS OF ZINC OXIDE THIN FILMS.

Abstract

The application of zinc oxide vice-avis the sensitivity in response to environmental condition makes the material a good candidate for continued research in areas of human life and existence. It is noted that human daily dependents such as food items, agricultural products, pharmaceutical materials, scientific equipment/ chemical are subjected to biological activities as a result of bioactive substances that cannot be easily detected. These bioactive substances can cause variations in the properties of their hosts. Such variation would be examined by introducing the fabricated Zinc Oxide into a body simulated fluid which is noted to contain bioactive materials. In this study, two sets of zinc oxide films sample were deposited using the chemical bath deposition technique; one treated with Simulated Body Fluid (SBF) which acts as a bioactive material for 30 days while the other left at free open laboratory atmosphere for the same number of days. The results of the analyses showed that the optical absorbance and energy band gap of the materials generally increases with wavelength, however, the bioactive treated materials have higher values than the as-deposited samples. The threshold frequency of the materials also increased with the bioactive samples. The structural characterization revealed two distinct peaks for samples deposited for 24 hours with an influenced crystalline orientation for the bioactive materials. Samples in the Body Simulated Fluid materials were also found to be densely packed with smaller grains than the as- deposited materials, an indication that external particles have been added to the original material which in turn influenced the change in characteristics of the original material. This implies that with proper engineering techniques, the zinc oxide thin films could be adapted either as electronic sensor or as device to detect the effects and presence of bioactive organism in located environments such as agricultural storage warehouse, pharmaceutical stores, hospital wards, food industries among others.