In this work, we have prepared undoped and vanadium doped ZnO nanopowders by sol–gel method. The treated powder at 500 °C has an average particle size of 25 nm. Pellets have been prepared at sintered temperature of 900 °C in atmospheric furnace. The characterization of the obtained pellets has been made by the X-ray diffraction, the UV–visible spectrophotometer, and cathodoluminescence (CL). The XRD analysis shows that ZnO has hexagonal wurtzite structure with a preferential direction along (101). It has also revealed that grain size and lattice parameters have increased after vanadium doping. The optical band gap has been found to increase from 3.15 to 3.27 eV as the V content varied from 0 to 10 %. CL spectra have shown a broad yellow emission at 2.2 eV and UV emission band around 3.16 eV. Doping with vanadium has enhanced the CL intensity of near band emission.
