Microwave-hydrothermal preparation of flower-like ZnO microstructure and its photocatalytic activity
(1. Faculty of Chemical Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650504, China;
2. Faculty of Environmental Science and Technology, Kunming University of Science and Technology,
Kunming 650504, China)
2. Faculty of Environmental Science and Technology, Kunming University of Science and Technology,
Kunming 650504, China)
Abstract: The flower-like ZnO microstructure was prepared by a straightforward microwave-hydrothermal technique using zinc chloride and arginine solution as reactants. The as-synthesized crystal structure and morphology were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and the optical properties of the ZnO nanostructure were studied by Raman and photoluminescence (PL) spectra, which confirms the high crystal quality of ZnO microstructure. The as-synthesized ZnO flowers exhibit a significant enhancement of photocatalytic capability toward degrading methyl blue (MB) under UV light, the photodegradation of MB reaches 95.60%, only within 2 h of adding the as-synthesized ZnO in the MB solution under UV irradiation. Furthermore, the photodegradation could be described as the pseudo-first-order kinetics with degradation rate constant of 1.0675-1.6275 h-1, which is relative to the morphology of the structures.
Key words: ZnO microstructure; microwave-hydrothermal method; photoluminescence; photodegradation