Urea Assisted Synthesis of Flower Like CuO Nanostructures and Their Chemical Sensing Application for the Determination of Cadmium Ions

Abstract

AbstractThe novel nanostructures of CuO with improved morphology are strongly required for the development of devices with enhanced performance. In this study flower like nanostructures of CuO are synthesized by hydrothermal method using urea as tuning material for the morphology of CuO during the growth process. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X‐ray diffraction (XRD) techniques were used for the characterization of these nanostructures. The nanostructures are highly dense, uniform and well aligned on the gold coated glass substrate. Moreover, CuO nanostructures exhibited pure phase of CuO. These novel CuO nanostructures were potentially used for the construction of cadmium ion sensor by functionalizing with tetrathia‐12‐crown‐4 a selective cadmium ion ionophore. The proposed cadmium ion sensor has detected the wide range of cadmium ion concentrations from 1.0×10−9–1.0×10−1 M with a sensitivity of 29.3±0.3 mV/decade and also a fast response time of less than 10.0 s is demonstrated. CuO nanostructures based cadmium ion selective electrode has also shown excellent reproducibility, repeatability, selectivity, and stability. The sensor electrode was also used as indicator electrode for the confirmation of practical utility and the obtained result describes the good behavior of the sensor in the potentiometric titration for the determination of cadmium ions.