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Hydrothermal growth of wheatear-shaped ZnO microstructures and their photocatalytic activity

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Abstract

A facile hydrothermal process was developed to synthesize novel wheatear-shaped ZnO microstructures at a low temperature (\(85^{\circ }\hbox {C}\)) without the assistance of any template agent. X-ray diffraction and field emission scanning electron microscopy were used to characterize the structure and morphology of the samples. Results showed that the length of the ‘wheatear’ was about \(5.8~\upmu \!\hbox {m}\) and the section width was \(1.2~\upmu \!\hbox {m}\). The particles consisted of closely packed nanorods with average diameter of 100 nm. The growth of wheatear-shaped ZnO is very rapid and can be achieved in only 5 min. \(\hbox {OH}^{-}\)-driven oriented aggregation and multistep nucleation resulted in the formation of wheatear-shaped ZnO microstructures. The product had assembled open structures and it exhibited excellent photocatalytic activity in the degradation of methyl orange under UV-light irradiation.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21203052), and the Science Foundation of Hebei Normal University (L2015Z03). We also thank LetPub for its linguistic assistance during manuscript preparation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Chemistry and Materials Science, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, 050024, China

    Ping Li & Bin Lu

  2. School of Chemical and Material Engineering, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, 214122, China

    Zhanzhou Luo

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  1. Ping Li
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  2. Bin Lu
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  3. Zhanzhou Luo
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Correspondence to Ping Li.

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Li, P., Lu, B. & Luo, Z. Hydrothermal growth of wheatear-shaped ZnO microstructures and their photocatalytic activity. Bull Mater Sci 40, 1069–1074 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12034-017-1465-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12034-017-1465-2

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