Synthesize Of Zinc Oxide Nanorods By Hydrothermal Method And Photocatalytic Activities

Zinc oxide (ZnO) is one of semiconductor materials which have photoelectricity and piezoelectricity characteristic. Its band gap is3.37eV at room temperature, so it is a typical wide band gap semiconductor material. The exciton binding energy of ZnO is60meV, which is much larger than other semiconductor such as ZnSe (22meV) and GaN (25meV), from this point of view, ZnO has very good application potential.Due to its special thermal, electrical properties and stable chemical properties, ZnO nanomaterial has good application prospect in fields such as optical, sensing, field emission, energy and catalysis.With the development of industry, the pollution of the environment, especially water pollution has become more and more serious. In water pollution treatment, the traditional management methods, such as precipitation, adsorption and dialysis treatment, cannot fundamentally solve the problem, and the cost is very high, while the semiconductor photocatalysts do not have such disadvantages, the principle of this technique is the use of semiconductor material to convert solar energy into chemical energy that organics decompose into simple small molecular inorganic matter, thus can solve the problem of water pollution completely. Due to its excellent optical and electrical properties, Zinc oxide nanomaterials have wide application prospects in photocatalytic degradation of organic waste and sterilization properties in water pollution.There are various methods to fabricate ZnO nanomaterials, these methods includes sol-gel method, template method, chemical vapor deposition method, electrodeposition method, hydrothermal method et. al. In all these methods, hydrothermal method has mild reaction conditions, the products have good crystallization degree and other advantages, thus have been used widely.In this study, analytically pure ZnO was used as zinc source, NaOH was used as mineralizer, hydrochloric acid and citric acid were used to adjust alkalinity of the reaction solution, and ZnO nanorods flowers and nanosheets assembled microspheres and some other morphologies nanomaterials were obtained. Alkalinity of the reaction solution, hydrothermal temperature and species of surface active agent were studied and their influences to morphologies of ZnO nanomaterials were discussed. Methyl orange be used as target pollution material, photocatalytic activities of as prepared ZnO nanomaterials were tested, and the results showed that in all different morphologies ZnO materials, nanorods have the best photocatalytic activity.