LAUSR

Abstract An economical and scalable technique, namely a modified wet-impregnation method, has been developed in order to control the size of CuO nanocrystals grown within a nanocrystalline TiO2 mesoporous layer. Cu (II) formate aqueous solution has been used as CuO precursor and different immersion times were experimented to decrease nanocrystal size. Synthesized nanocomposite films have been characterized using scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction which reveals the nanocrystal size to depend on the immersion time. Results indicate that nanocrystals grow almost linearly for immersion time shorter than 60 min. Nanocrystal growth is not linear for a long immersion time; size increased less than 10% when the immersion time changed from one to 18 h.