Synthesis of Functional Nanostructured and Nanocomposite Materials for Printed Electronic Devices

Abstract

There has been growing interest in the field of nanotechnology during the last two decades and nanostructured materials have the enormous contribution in this development. After the progress in synthesis of nanostructured materials, their functional characteristics were investigated and thus peculiar optical, chemical, electrical, mechanical and magnetic properties have been exploited. These nanostructured materials can be tailored to obtain desired characteristics by making their nanocomposites with various organic polymers or inorganic nanoparticles and their usage as thin films and coatings can further explore their applications in several fields. This thesis reports a complete study based on synthesis, characterization, ink preparation, thin film fabrication and applications of functional nanostructured and nanocomposite materials. In this study, various low dimensional functional nanostructured materials have been synthesized and developed including zero dimensional (0D) molybdenum sulfide(MoS_(2)) quantum dots (QDs), one dimensional (1D) zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires (NWs), two dimensional (2D) MoS2, and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) nanosheets; and three dimensional (3D) zinc stannate (ZnSnO_(3)) nanocubes (NCs). Moreover, the nanocomposites of as synthesized low dimensional nanostructured materials have also been reported that include nanocomposite of ZnSnO_(3))/PMMA, ZnSnO_(3)/PPVOH, hBN/PVOH, ZnO/ZnSnO_(3), and MoS_(2)-PEDOT:PSS. Applications of these nanostructures and nanocomposite materials have been presented by fabricating non-volatile resistive switching and humidity sensing devices using printing techniques like EHDA, reverse offset, SAW-EHDA, RPC, and EHD patterning. The morphological, structural, chemical, and optical characteristics of nanostructured and nanocomposite materials were analysed by using different characterization techniques like HR-TEM, FE-SEM, AFM, XRD, Raman, FTIR, EDX and UV/VIS spectroscopy. Furthermore, the electrical and mechanical results have also been reported to show the performance and mechanical robustness of the fabricated devices.