Abstract

• In this research work, nano-sized Zinc Oxide powder (ZnO) were prepared by using Zinc Chloride and Sodium Hydroxide as the precursors and annealed at different temperatures at 400ºC, 500ºC and 600ºC respectively. Structural and optical properties of the observable ZnO powders were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Ultraviolet visible spectrophotometer (UV-vis).By XRD analysis, Zinc Oxide revealed hexagonal wuritze structure nature. It was found that with increasing the annealing temperature the particle size increased about 38̃̃~41 nm by using Debye Scherrer's equation. Lattice strain, c/a ratio and dislocation density parameters were obtained from XRD analysis results. According to the average crystallite size, the size of the particles increases as the annealing temperature is increased. The SEM results have visualized the morphology of ZnO nanoparticles with irregular spherical in shape and highly agglomerated. To investigate the optical results of the grown Zinc oxide, the absorption spectra are evaluated in the ultravioletvisible (UV-Vis) range. Based on the optical analysis results, the energy band gap of different annealing temperature samples was calculated from the linear extrapolated line of (αhγ)2 vs. hγ plot.