| dc.description.abstract | Over the recent years, the global increase of electronic wastes from electrical and electronic devices (e-wastes) have been on an alarming trend in quantity and toxicity and e-waste are non-biodegradable resulting into its cumulative increase overtime. Changes in technology and unrestricted regional movement of electrical devices has facilitated the generation of more e-wastes leading to high level so fair, soil and water pollution. To address these challenges, biodegradable organic components such as chitosan have been used to replace their inorganic counterparts for optoelectronic device applications. This is mainly due to non-toxicity, biodegradability, mechanical strength and tunable optoelectronic properties of such materials. Optoelectronic properties of chitosan composites have been extensively studied. However, in-depth knowledge on how the optoelectronic properties of pure chitosan can be optimized by controlling the processing or post processing conditions has not been extensively exploited. This study has thus been dedicated to optimize processing parameters (acid concentration, time and hydrolysis temperature) for the development of chitosan solutions with excellent optical properties with a view to improving its applications in optoelectronic devices. Chitosan solutions were extracted from shrimp using 1.0 to2.5 m o l a r hydrochloric acid between 1 to 4 hours within a temperature range of 30C.The absorbance spectra of the samples were collected by UV-Vis spectrophotometer. The band gap energies, Urbach energy and band tails were a n a l y z e d by performing Tauc’splot. Red shifting of chitosan absorption peaks were observed as acid concentration was raised from 1.0-2.5M from279.667nm to 283.598 nm. The band gap of chitosan was widened by increasing acid concentration, time and temperature. Furthermore Urbach energy and band tails showed a remarkable increase on increasing these preparation parameters. | en_US |