Investigation of electrochromic properties of erbium doped/undoped thin films

Electrochromic devices have a wide application area in today's technology however, their usage potential limited by the low coloration kinetics and short lifetimes of themselves. Because of the fact that investigation of each layer that forms the main device, becomes very important for the improvement of electrochromic device technology. In this thesis, we aimed to produce and investigate these two functional layers such as CeO2 as a passive ion storage and TiO2, V2O5, WO3 as electrochromically coloring layers. These oxides which known as relatively high band gap materials produced by sol gel dip coating technology using different solutions. Additionally erbium doping on the materials studied because of the important transition of Er ions, which corresponds the optical telecommunication wavelength around 1540nm. Structural and morphological properties of the films investigated by means of FTIR, XRD, AFM moreover optical properties examined by UV-vis spectrophotometry, ellipsometry and photoluminescence measurements. Electrochemical properties of the films studied by cyclic voltammetry and chronoamperometry experiments that carried out in a three electrode cell configuration in 1M LiClO4/propylene carbonate electrolyte.