Abstract
Surfaces with metal oxide nanostructures have gained considerable interest in applications such as sensors, detectors, energy harvesting cells, and batteries. However, conventional fabrication techniques suffer from challenges that hinder wide and effective applications of such surfaces. Most of the metal oxide nanostructure synthesis methods are costly, complicated, non-scalable, environmentally hazardous, or applicable to only certain few materials. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a simple metal oxide nanostructure fabrication method that can overcome all these limitations and pave the way to the industrial application of such surfaces. Here, we demonstrate that a wide variety of metals can form metal oxide nanostructures on their surfaces after simply interacting with hot water. This method, what we call hot water treatment, offers the ability to grow metal oxide nanostructures on most of the metals in the periodic table, their compounds, or alloys by a one-step, scalable, low-cost, and eco-friendly process. In addition, our findings reveal that a “plugging” mechanism along with surface diffusion is critical in the formation of such nanostructures. This work is believed to be of importance especially for researchers working on the growth of metal oxide nanostructures and their application in functional devices.
Highlights
As nanomaterials find new applications in various fields, metal oxide nanostructures (MONSTRs) are not an exemption due to their exceptional physical and chemical properties
45 different types of metals that involve several pure elements, alloys, and compounds were treated by hot DI water in a search for which metals respond to hot water treatment (HWT) and form MONSTRs
It is believed that metal hydroxide phase that could form through hydrolysis, which is typically amorphous[38], is insignificant during the growth of HWT MONSTRs mainly due to the notable hydrogen bubble formation observed for most of the metals studied and well defined textured shapes of the MONSTR crystals (Fig. 1)
Summary
As nanomaterials find new applications in various fields, metal oxide nanostructures (MONSTRs) are not an exemption due to their exceptional physical and chemical properties. Various approaches have been used to synthesize metal oxide nanostructures, including chemical vapor deposition[15,16,17], thermal evaporation[18,19,20], hydrothermal[21,22,23], and laser ablation[24, 25] Each of these methods incorporates challenging aspects such as being limited to only a few number of materials, costly processing or demanding high temperatures, which have limited their commercial applications. Fabricating MONSTRs using a new alternative method with practical features including applicability to wide range of materials, high-throughput fabrication, catalyst-free growth, low-synthesis temperature, low-cost equipment, and being environment-friendly is highly desirable in order to overcome the limitations of conventional techniques. We investigated the possibility of MONSTR formation at elevated temperatures using HWT
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