Low-temperature synthesis of porous hollow structured Cu2O for photocatalytic activity and gas sensor application

Abstract

In this contribution, a facile and low-temperature solution route has been developed to large-scale synthesis of Cu₂O with polyhedral, porous and hollow structures by the assistance of surfactant CTAB. The morphologies (six symmetric branches, porous branches and porous-shell hollow spheres) of the Cu₂O particles, which can be controlled by changing the amount of CTAB and a possible formation mechanism, is also proposed. Our results found that CTAB not only serves as a soft template to synthesize hollow and porous Cu₂O structures, but also acts as a capping agent to adsorb on the {111} plane to obtain six symmetric branches of Cu₂O. Moreover, the photocatalytic and gas-sensing properties of the hollow and porous structure Cu₂O samples were studied in detail. Due to the special structure character, the Cu₂O porous-shell hollow spheres exhibited both strong adsorption abilities and high degradation activities for methyl orange (MO) under visible light irradiation. A gas sensor was also fabricated which showed high sensitivity for ethanol.