Fabrication of 3D ordered mesoporous ball-flower structures ZnO material with the excellent gas sensitive property

In this study, a kind of unfamiliar 3D ball-flower morphology ZnO was prepared through a facile and low cost hydrothermal reaction method which was assembled with 50 nm thickness ZnO nanosheets. A kind of ordered mesoporous ZnO material must be used as precursor in hydrothermal reaction which was prepared by soft template method. The surfaces of the ball-flower morphology ZnO were distributed with 5.2 nm wide ordered mesoporous, which led to the bigger specific surface area in the material, it reached to 108.69 m(2)g(-1). The morphology, structure and gas sensing performance toward NOx of the prepared material were tested, and the optimum synthesis conditions were determined. At room temperature (25 degrees C), the ball-flower ZnO nanomaterial showed the excellent gas response to NOx, whose response to 100 ppm NOx gas reached 68.9 %, the response time was only 6 s, and the detection limit was 1 ppm. It broke the tradition that the pure ZnO showed gas response to NOx only in relatively high temperatures.