Preparation and characterization of ZnO at different amounts of cellulose composite using hydrothermal method

In this paper, zinc oxide were successfully synthesized via simple hydrothermal method by controlling the different amounts of cellulose. The zinc chloride was use as a transition metal precursor to synthesize the ZnO with the presence of sodium hydroxide. The mixture were heated at 180 °C for 6 hours for all samples. The different amount of cellulose from (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) g were added in mixture. The morphogical variation, the optical band gap of zinc oxide varied by the different amount of cellulose were studied. The samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), UV-vis spectroscopy (UVvis) and Scanning electron microscope (SEM). XRD pattern shows that the ZnO/Cellulose structured exhibit the hexagonal wurtzite structure with the average crystallite size is calculated. UV-Vis spectroscopy shows the absorption or reflectance peaks of zinc oxide was around 300 to 400 nm indicates the presence of blueshift. The energy band gap was found to be decrease with the different amount of the cellulose. Thus, different amount of cellulose plays a crucial role to the structure control and turning of band gap. The morphology images by SEM revealed the agglomerated particles structures for all samples.