Gas-phase Cation Exchange Towards Porous Single-crystal CoO Nanorods For Application Research

Ion exchange is a versatile method to achieve design of nanomaterial. Then we got 1-D structures base on ZnO nanomaterial. The main research results are as follows:Firstly, we developed a facile and scalable route for the synthesis of PS CoO NRs through gas phase cation exchange using ZnO NRs as template. The cation exchange was verified to proceed gradually from the outer surface to the inner core of ZnO NRs, and the completely transformed CoO NRs can be achieved at the exchange temperature of 600 oC. As-synthesized PS CoO NRs possess highly dense active sites and exhibit outstanding catalytic activities superior PP CoO NRs and even noble metal catalysts. Our work paves the way for application PS CoO NRs as an excellent candidate for catalytic production of green energy.Secondly, we firstly employed CoO NRAs for photocathode materials for hydrogen production. In this work, remarkably high catalytic activities for photocathode of photoelectrochemical water splitting have been found for the asprepared PS CoO NRAs which is better than PP CoO NWAs. This work reported here offers a good example for designing of metal oxide semiconductor single crystalline NRAs for photoelectrochemical water splitting for converting solar energy into chemical energy.Finally, we successfully synthesized the CdS/CoO cornlike nanorods by physical vapor deposition. The photocatalytic tests proved that the CdS/CoO nanocomposites exhibited excellent photocatalytic properties under visible light irradiation which could be attributed to the synergy between CoO and CdS and the cornlike nanorods structure. These results show that the CdS/CoO cornlike nanorods are promising to be used as high-performance visible-light-driven photocatalyst.