INFLUENCE OF Y₂O₃ DOPING ON THE STRUCTURAL, OPTICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PROPERTIES OF SPRAY PYROLYZED MOO₃ THIN FILMS

Abstract

MoO3 nanoparticles doped with Y2O3 could be achieved by using a well-regulated sol-gel method to render its structural, optical, and biomedical properties to be even more useful with defect engineering mediated by rare-earth. The X-ray diffraction has also verified the presence of crystalline orthorhombic MoO3 with effective yttrium incorporation due to the slight changes in peaks and altered crystallite size in absence of secondary impurity phases. Micrographs showed in FESEM all uniformly distributed nanostructures that have a lower agglomeration level and better surface structure when doped. UV-Vis spectroscopy was used to show that there was strong UV absorption with a tuning optical band gap that was explained by lattice distortion and defect level formation. The use of biological evaluation proved a strong antimicrobial effect on bacterial strains of Gram-positive and Gram-negative and confirmed that efficacy of membrane disruption and microbial inhibition by Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS). Antioxidant tests indicated a high free-radical scavenging capacity, and the result also showed that there was a redox-active surface behavior. Moreover, the highest performance of NO2 was produced by the 0.1 M Y2O3-doped MoO3 thin film, which showed desirable selectivity, response size and sensitivity at the optimum operating temperature relative to the low concentrations of precursors (0.025 M and 0.05 M). Comprehensively, yttrium doping provided a substantial impact on crystallinity, surface defects, and biological performance, making Y2O3 doped MoO3 nanoparticles to be promising multifunctional nanomaterials in antimicrobial.