Precursor concentration dependent hydrothermal NiO nanopetals: Tuning morphology for efficient applications

Abstract

A precursor's concentration dependent surface morphologies of NiO nanopetals (NPs) have been studied for designing application-specific nanomaterials by hydrothermal technique. The surface morphologies, obtained using scanning electron microscopy, have been analysed using ImageJ to extract information about the dependence of petal thickness, petal density and linear porosity on the concentration at a given deposition and annealing temperatures. A detailed analysis shows how the synthesis parameters can be optimized to get a desired application specific nanostructure by taking an example of field emission properties. NiO NPs were prepared with three different precursor's concentrations out of which the sample prepared with lowest concentration was identified to show very good field emission property with high enhancement factor. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd