Study of Structural Morphological Optical and Surface Properties of Ag Doped ZnO and Poly Styrene co Acrylonitrile ZnO Nanocomposite

Abstract

Synthesis and characterization of polymer-semiconductor polymer nanocomposite (PNs) is an important area due to their practical significance in materials science research. In the present work, poly (Styrene co acrylonitrile) (PSAN) has been chosen as polymer matrix with ZnO nanoparticles (NPs) as filler. The co-precipitation and in-situ emulsion polymerization are the best capable method for synthesis of Ag-doped ZnO NPs and PSAN/ZnO PNs due to their easy processing, low cost and effective properties of final PNs. newline The present thesis work is divided into two objectives. First part deals with synthesis and evaluation of structural, optical, morphological and photo catalytic properties of Ag doped ZnO NPs synthesized by co-precipitation method. In this objective, an effort has been made to develop tuned NPs having effective and efficient photo catalytic abilities. The Ag doping in ZnO matrix brought increase in crystallite size (D) from 46.47 nm to 54.80 nm, change in strain (and#603;) and uniform morphology with homogenous distribution of their constituent. Water pollution with drainage of organic dyes from different textiles, pharmaceutical and coloring industry has been a challenge to the society. In this context, degradation of methylene blue and brilliant blue dye with Ag doped ZnO NPs has been achieved to 98.66 % and 97.36 % respectively. newline The second objective deals with the synthesis of PSAN ZnO nanocomposite by insitu emulsion newline newlinepolymerization and their evaluation for structural, optical, morphological, thermal and surface wettability properties. The presence of ZnO phase in polymer matrix has been confirmed by XRD study. The formation of PSAN copolymer structure has been established by the presence of their mass fragments (electron spray mass spectrometer (ESI-MS)). For Polymer/ZnO PNs, the UV absorption edge shifted to 375 nm with enhanced luminescence in visible range as compared to pristine polymer. This further predicts that nanocomposite can be used as UV-shielding material with active lum