Growth of ZnO nanowires on nonwoven polyethylene fibers

Abstract

We report the growth of ZnO nanowires on nonwoven polyethylene fibers using a simple hydrothermal method at a temperature below the boiling point of water. The ZnO nanowires were grown from seed ZnO nanoparticles affixed onto the fibers. The seed ZnO nanoparticles, with diameters of about 6-7 nm, were synthesized in isopropanol by reducing zinc acetate hydrate with sodium hydroxide. The growth process was carried out in a sealed chemical bath containing an equimolar solution of zinc nitrate hexahydrate and hexamethylene tetramine at a temperature of 95 • C over a period of up to 20 h. The thickness and length of the nanowires can be controlled by using different concentrations of the starting reactants and growth durations. A 0.5 mM chemical bath yielded nanowires with an average diameter of around 50 nm, while a 25 mM bath resulted in wires with a thickness of up to about 1 µm. The length of the wires depends both on the concentration of the precursor solution as well as the growth duration, and in 20 h, nanowires as long as 10 µm can be grown. The nonwoven mesh of polyethylene fibers covered with ZnO nanowires can be used for novel applications such as water treatment by degrading pollutants by photocatalysis. Photocatalysis tests carried out on standard test contaminants revealed that the polyethylene fibers with ZnO nanowires grown on them could accelerate the photocatalytic degradation process by a factor of 3.

Hydrothermally Synthesis Nanostructure ZnO Thin Film for Photocatalysis Application

“…Defined vertically aligned nanorods have average diameter 150 nm and length of several hundred nanometers. Such vertically aligned ZnO nanorods useful for photo catalysis application process [23] [24].…”

Investigation of growth parameter influence on hydrothermally grown ZnO nanowires using a research grade microwave

“…Nanowires made out of ZnO are of particular interest due to the unique properties of ZnO such as a wide direct bandgap, a large exciton binding energy, piezoelectric properties, and chemical sensitivity. Potential applications for ZnO nanowires include optoelectronics such as photodetectors [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9], piezoelectric actuators and generators [2,6,[10][11][12], UV nanolasers [3,4,6,8,12], field effect transistors [1,3,5,9,12,13], solar cell components [3,5,9,11,12,14], gas sensors [3,5,7,15], and organic filters [16].…”

“…Popular methods for growing ZnO nanowires include vapor-solid or vapor-liquidsolid (gas-phase synthesis) [2,4,9,13], and hydrothermal (solution-phase synthesis) [1,3,5,7,8,[10][11][12]14,16] 13,15,16]. ZnO nanowires grown in this fashion possess a highly crystalline structure and can have a high aspect ratio [4,13,15], but THE high temperatures required for this growth process pose problems for thermally-restricted fabrication processes.…”

“…ZnO nanowires grown in this fashion possess a highly crystalline structure and can have a high aspect ratio [4,13,15], but THE high temperatures required for this growth process pose problems for thermally-restricted fabrication processes. Hydrothermal growth methods allow for low-temperature synthesis of ZnO nanowires (NWs) directly on a variety of novel substrates required for proposed flexible substrate applications such as power-harvesting fabrics [11,16].…”

“…Although hydrothermal growth opens up a new realm of application possibilities, a major drawback of this method is THE growth time -up to 20 hours or longer have been reported as necessary to yield desired NW morphologies using conventional hot-plate heating [5,6,8,12,16]. Recently, the use of A microwave oven to supply heat to the nutrient solution has been reported to speed the growth process by Unalan, et al [12].…”