Chapter 10 - Recent Advances in the Synthesis of Metal Oxide (MO) Nanostructures

Abstract

With the ever-growing demand for highly efficient materials, metal oxide nanostructures are receiving a lot of attention in diverse fields because of their unique inherent characteristics and potential in a broad range of applications. Metal oxide nanostructures (e.g., nanoparticles, nanowires, nanofibers, nanosheets, nanobelts, nanoflowers, nanospheres) have been extensively investigated for different applications, such as water remediation, photocatalysis, lithium-ion batteries, biomedical applications, sensing, electronic chips, and many more. The overall performance of any nanomaterial depends upon its physical and chemical structure, which is wholly dictated by its route of synthesis by which the morphology, crystallinity, defects, size uniformity, homogenous stoichiometry, etc. of the nanostructures can be controlled. To date, a great many synthetic approaches have been developed and exploited to produce next-generation metal oxide nanomaterials, such as precipitation, template-assisted fabrication, electrospinning, hydrothermal, microwave-assisted synthesis, reverse micelle, sol-gel techniques, vapor-phase approach, and chemical vapor deposition (CVD). All of these techniques share some advantages and disadvantages in terms of several parameters, such as operational cost, safety concerns, yield of product, ease of use, and capital investment. Thus, it is very important to select an appropriate methodology when synthesizing a specific metal oxide nanostructure because it will affect the whole behavior of the nanomaterial in that particular application. Here in this chapter, recent developments in the novel synthesis of advanced metal oxide nanostructures will be discussed.