Oxidizing agent impacting on growth of ZnO tetrapod nanostructures and its characterization

In this paper, the fabrication of ZnO tetrapod was investigated. It was synthesized by the thermal oxidation technique using metal zinc powder mixed with oxidizing agents such as hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) and ammonium persulfate ((NH₄)₂S₂O₈). The furnace heating temperature reached at 1000 °C in the air. The average diameter and length of a tetrapod leg for mixture with H₂O₂ from SEM were 45.3 nm and 1.57 μm, respectively. The oxygen vacancy (36%) of ZnO tetrapod with H₂O₂ was higher than 33% of ZnO tetrapod with only Zn. Growth mechanism of ZnO tetrapod was processed via the formation of Zn nucleus and growing the wurtzite structure. The growing directions of ZnO crystal conformed with the [0001] direction. ZnO tetrapod showed up the high resolution TEM image with the lattice spacing 0.252 nm. From these results, this work was indicated that H₂O₂ solution was a better oxidizing reaction helper to make ZnO tetrapod nanostructures than anything else.