Photo electrochemical stability response of ZnO nanoflowers fabricated through single step electrochemical anodization
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Photo electrochemical stability response of ZnO nanoflowers fabricated through single step electrochemical anodization Ab Mateen Tantray1 · M. A. Shah1 Received: 30 July 2020 / Accepted: 3 November 2020 © Institute of Chemistry, Slovak Academy of Sciences 2020
Abstract The present article reports synthesis of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanostructures by the single step electrochemical anodization process at room temperature in an aqueous bicarbonate solution. Structural characterizations indicated that the material has grown in the wurtzite phase. Morphological study revealed formation of ZnO nanoflowers with ZnO nanoflakes acting as flower petals having an average width of 53 ± 2 nm and average length of 120 ± 3 nm. ZnO nanoflowers exhibited improved photo electrochemical ability compared to zinc oxide nanowires. The enhanced photo electrochemical ability of nanoflowers could be accounted to the presence of numerous active edge sites in 2D flakes (petals) together with large oxygen vacancy content on the surface of zinc foil revealed by Raman spectroscopy. Additionally, as-fabricated zinc oxide nanoflowers were studied for better light absorption through diffuse reflectance spectroscopy which showed the material possess an optical band gap ~ 3.16 eV. Moreover, Photo electrochemical ability of as fabricated zinc oxide nanoflowers were studied using photo electrochemical analyser and it showed a current density of ~ 60 μA cm− 2. This indicated potential ability of ZnO nanoflowers to serve as UV–visible sunlight-driven photoelectrode materials. Graphic abstract
Keywords Zinc oxide · Anodic oxidation · Nanoflowers · Photoelectrode material Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11696-020-01419-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * M. A. Shah [email protected] 1
Special Lab for Nano‑Science, P.G. Department of Physics, National Institute of Technology Srinagar, Hazratbal, Srinagar 190006, Jammu and Kashmir, India
Introduction Zinc oxide, an n-type semiconductor is the most widely and intensively studied material among the other various nanomaterials because of its high excitonic binding energy (60 meV), energy band width of 3.37 eV and a hexagonal
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wurtzite structure (Fan and Lu 2005). Furthermore, the fabrication of various forms of nanostructures with diverse structural and optical properties through anodization is an effective and less time consuming technique than other fabrication methods. Various properties are determined by studying the different nanostructures having different sizes and shapes (Gomez and Tigli 2013). Different nanostructures, for instance nanorods (Dai et al. 2002), nanowires (Huang et al. 2001), nanotubes (Miles et al. 2015), nanoflowers (Abdulgafour et al. 2010), nanoporous (Mika et al. 2019) of zinc oxide nanomaterial have been fabricated with numerous applications through different techniques like hydrothermal (Mansournia et al. 2015), microwave (Huang
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