Effect of copper precursor salts: Facile and sustainable synthesis of controlled shaped copper oxide nanoparticles

Abstract

A facile and sustainable protocol for the synthesis of copper oxide (CuO) nanoparticles has been developed successfully. This synthesis protocol has been comparatively easy to implement and could contribute to overcome the challenge of obtaining numerous morphologies of CuO in efficient and sustainable routine. Different shapes of CuO nanoparticles have been synthesized via simply changing the precursor copper salts such as copper nitrate (Cu(NO3)2), and copper chloride (CuCl2) with the same synthetic protocol. Herein, a comparative study has done in between structural, morphological and optical properties of as synthesized CuO nanoparticles. XRD analysis indicated that nanoparticles closely resembled and had monoclinic CuO nanocrystals. The FESEM result demonstrates that morphology of particles obtained is mainly due to the precursor salts. Both prepared CuO particle using either Cu(NO3)2 or CuCl2 are in good dispersion and found to be in nanometer size. The CuCl2 gives the highly dense packed mixed morphology of cubic and sphere shaped particles. Whereas (Cu(NO3)2 shown only flakes like morphology. FTIR analysis proposed the reacting process which described the corresponding vectorial relations between crystal parameters. Copper hydroxide gives rise to oxide through the formation of a Cu(NH3)2+4, by a reconstructive transformation involving a dissolution reaction followed by a precipitation. The optical properties of both samples show several emission peaks in visible spectrum range. All characterization results revealed that chemophysical properties of CuO nanoparticles are highly dependent on Cu salts.