Preparation And Characterization Of Cu₂O Nanowhiskers And Studies Of Their Photocatalytic Activity

Nano materials possess of chemical and physical properties that are apparently different with those of bulks. Thereby that causes extensive interesting in these years and the achievements and affections, permeating in all the fields, are always attracting since the founding of nano-materials and nano-technologies. Especially the applications in environmental protection and recovering have exhibited promising future. The further studies in the application of the field will bring new chance to our country and the whole world in the field of environment. TiO2, as a kind of photo-catalyst, can be used to degrade organic contamination with dramatic effects. However, there is also some shortcoming. In 1998, Ikeda et al firstly showed that Cu2O could decompose H2O to H2 and O2 in the sunlight. It predicts that Cu2O may be employed as a promising catalyst under visible light. As we know, the quantum efficiency of bulk Cu2O is quite low while increase as the scale of Cu2O transform from micrometer to nanoscale.The aim we pray is to synthesize small-scale nano Cu2O with uniform morphologies by simple method, and then discuss the activities of photo-catalysis of nano Cu2O. We report the fabrication of nanowhiskers Cu2O using soft template in the second and third chapter. First, we synthesize nanowhiskers Cu2O in liquid phase using surfactant cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) as template and then characterize the as-synthesized samples by TEM, XRD, XPS, HRTEM et al. In additional, we also optimize the experimental conditions for the best samples. We find when 2.5g CuSO4 5H2O, 4.0g NaOH, 50mg CTAB, 4.0ml 1M N2H4 H2O was applied, Cu2O nanowhiskers with stable attributes, about 10nm in diameter and 500nm in length, were obtained. Furthermore, Using sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), glucose, and polyethyleneglycol (PEG), these three additives, we also obtained nanowhiskers of Cu2O with uniform diameter of 300-500nm. The growth mechanism is also discussed via using the four surfactants.In the fourth chapter, a research work on the photo-catalytic activation property using home-synthesized nanowhiskers of CU2O was performed. The experiment showed that the CU2O nanowhiskers with surface ratio of 20.51 m2/g, catalyzed by visible light, can produce OH finally, and make the concentration of p-chloro-nitrobenzene to degrade 82.7%, and the nanowhiskers can be used for several times again and again.