January 2002

Materials Letters 52 2002. 3438

www.elsevier.comrlocatermatlet

A convenient alcohothermal approach for low temperature

synthesis of CuO nanoparticles
Zhong-shan Hong, Yong Cao, Jing-fa Deng )
Department of Chemistry, Fudan Uniersity, Shanghai 200433, China
Received 23 January 2001; accepted 19 March 2001

Abstract

A convenient alcohothermal route to prepare cupric oxide nanoparticles using copper acetate as the starting material was
successfully developed. The influence of reaction temperature on the formation of CuO nanoparticles was investigated. The
yield was as high as 100% when the alcohothermal synthesis was carried at 1108C. The particle sizes of the CuO
nanoparticles can be controlled to be between ; 3 and 9 nm simply by varying the reaction temperature. The possible
formation mechanism of CuO nanoparticles via the alcohothermal method is discussed. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All
rights reserved.

PACS: 71.24.q q
Keywords: Alcohothermal; Nanoparticle; Cupric oxide; Acetate; XRD; XPS

1. Introduction faces, unusual optical, electrical, and catalytic prop-

erties, etc. As a result, it is always desirable that
In recent years, copper oxide has attracted in- physical and chemical characteristics can be con-
creasingly interests for both fundamental and practi- trolled by tuning the grain size of the CuO particles
cal reasons. It has shown to be an industrially impor- in practical applications.
tant material that can be widely used in applications In the past decades, much effort has been made
such as gas sensors, magnetic storage media, solar toward the synthesis and characterization of nano-
energy transformation, semiconductors and catalysis sized transition metal oxide particles. Among all
w14x. With the decrease in the crystal size, nano- transition metal oxides that have been investigated,
sized copper oxides may exhibit unique properties much less work has been devoted to the preparation
which can be significantly different from those of and characterization of CuO nanoparticles. It is well
their bulk counterparts, for example, the large inter- known that copper oxides can be conventionally
facial areas, homogeneity and highly reactive sur- obtained by the thermal decomposition of copper
salts in solid state, for instance, the nitrates, hydrox-
ides or sometimes the hydroxysalts obtained from
)
Corresponding author. Tel.: q86-21-6564-3977; fax: q86-21-
the direct deposition method w5x. This simple method
6564-1740. allows the preparation of the tenorite copper oxide in
E-mail address: [email protected] J. Deng.. large amounts. However, it is too difficult to control

00167-577Xr02r$ - see front matter q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 1 6 7 - 5 7 7 X 0 1 . 0 0 3 6 1 - 5
 Z. Hong et al.r Materials Letters 52 (2002) 3438 35

the grain size of the resulting copper oxide particles 2. Experimental

through this method. Several new synthetic ap-
proaches have been developed in the aim to achieve 2.1. Sample preparation
the preparation of nano-sized CuO particles. Re-
cently, Vorobyova et al. w6x prepared a stable col- Fifty milliliters of copper acetate CuOAc. 2 . al-
loidal solution of copperII. oxide 6 nm. in octane coholic solution 0.05 M. were put into a Teflon
by an interphase synthesis at interaction of copperII. liner stainless steel autoclave of 60-ml capacity. The
oleate and sodium hydroxide dissolved in octane and autoclave was then put into an oven and kept con-
water, respectively. This method is too elaborate and stantly under autogeneous pressure at varied temper-
may not be appropriate for preparation of CuO atures "18C, controlled by the oven. for 20 h. A
nanoparticles in large amounts. More recently, a representative sample was prepared at temperature of
novel sonochemical method has been successfully 1108C S2.. For comparison, the varied preparation
developed by Kumar et al. w7x to prepare the copper temperature at 908C S1., 1308C S3., 1508C S4.,
oxide nanoparticles ; 6 nm. in various organic and 1808C S5. were also carried out. After the
solvents such as DMF. Using copper acetate as reaction, the autoclave was cooled to room tempera-
starting material, this method only affords the forma- ture naturally. The product was recovered by cen-
tion of CuO in a very low yield; moreover, the trifugation, then the product was washed two times
highly expensive ultrasonic equipment a high-inten- in distilled water and three times in ethanol, and then
sity ultrasonic horn. is required in this preparation vacuum dried at room temperature. A black powder
process. product was finally obtained. The purity of the prod-
Solvothermal process has been shown to be a uct was analyzed by inductively coupled plasma-
powerful technique for generating novel materials atomic emission spectroscopy ICP-AES., and no
with interesting properties. Particularly, the solvo- more than 100 ppm of any purity was detected.
thermal technique provides the alternative approach
2.2. XRD, TEM and XPS studies
that allows the economical synthesis of fundamen-
tally important well-defined nanometer-sized materi- X-ray diffraction patterns of the CuO nanoparti-
als at mild conditions. To our knowledge, this new cles were recorded using nickel filtered Cu K a
synthetic technique has not been applied in the syn- radiation on a Bruker D8 Advance diffractometer
thesis of transition metal oxides such as copper Bruker, Germany.. The feature micrographs were
oxide. obtained using a Hitachi H600 high resolution trans-
The present work is focused on the synthesis and mission electron microscope, with the voltage ap-
characterization of nanometer-sized CuO particles plied to measurements being 20 kV. The average
prepared by a solvothermal method. In this work, we grain size of the samples was measured and deter-
report a simple synthetic approach for the prepara- mined by TEM and XRD. The X-ray photoelectron
tion of CuO nanoparticles through an alcohothermal spectroscopy XPS. experiments were carried out on
process using copper acetate as starting materials at a Perkin-Elmer PHI 5000C ESCA system using Al
mild conditions. Two influential parameters, includ- K a radiation 1486.6 eV.. The spectrometer was
ing the reaction temperature and reaction time on the operated at the resolution of about 1 eV.
alcohothermal process, were investigated. The struc-
tural and morphological characterization of the as-
prepared CuO nanoparticles were carried out by 3. Results and discussions
means of transmission electron microscopy TEM.,
X-ray diffraction XRD. and X-ray photoelectron Stable CuO nanoparticles, having size as small as
spectroscopy. The results show that CuO nanoparti- 39 nm, have been successfully synthesized using a
cles can be obtained at a yield of as high as ; 100%. novel synthetic route by alcohothermal processing of
It is also found that the particle sizes of the CuO the copper acetate at temperatures below 1508C. Fig.
nanoparticles can be controlled in the range of 39 1 shows the XRD patterns of the as-prepared sam-
nm simply by varying the reaction temperature. ples obtained at various reaction temperatures. The
36 Z. Hong et al.r Materials Letters 52 (2002) 3438

corresponding to that of CuO has now disappeared.

Meanwhile, only two sharp diffraction peaks charac-
teristic of metallic copper could be found for sample
S5, indicating the formation of metallic copper in-
stead of the production of larger CuO nanoparticles
under higher reaction temperature in the alcohother-
mal synthesis. This interest finding demonstrates that
at a high reaction temperature ) 1808C., the oxide
state of CuII. was readily reduced to elemental
Cu0. by the organic solvent of ethanol, which was
in good accordance with the experimental facts as
reported by other researchers w8x.
A typical TEM image of the CuO nanoparticles
alcohothermally prepared at 1508C is presented in
Fig. 1. X-ray diffraction patterns of the samples prepared using
the alcohothermal route at different temperatures: a. 908C; b. Fig. 2, showing that the samples are composed of
1108C; c. 1508C; and d. 1808C. non-aggregated spherical particles. The average par-
ticle diameters based on the TEM analysis were
found to be approximately ; 11 nm for sample S4,
samples prepared at different reaction temperatures which was in good agreement with the result of
of 908C, 1108C, 1308C, 1508C and 1808C are re- XRD results. Note that the XRD technique appears
ferred as S1, S2, S3, S4 and S5, respectively. As to slightly underestimate the particle size in the
shown in Fig. 1a, the broad diffraction bands from present case.
the sample S1 are characteristic of nanoparticles with
a low crystallinity. The XRD pattern is identical to
that of pure CuO, without signals from CuOAc. 2 ,
Cu 2 O, or other precursor compounds, indicating the
formation of high purity single-phase CuO with a
monoclinic structure. The mean crystalline size of
the sample S1, estimated from Sherrer formula, is
about 2.9 nm. Increasing the reaction temperature in
the alcohothermal synthesis results in the observation
of the intensification and sharpening of the diffrac-
tion peaks for the samples of S2 1108C. and S4
1508C. in Fig. 1b and c. This shows that the size of
the CuO grains has grown and the crystal quality has
been improved. Using Sherrer formula, the estimated
average grain sizes for sample S2, S3 not shown in
Fig. 1., and S4 were ; 3.4 nm, 4.2 nm and 8.9 nm,
respectively. The present XRD data demonstrate
clearly the growth in size of the CuO nanoparticles
as a function of the reaction temperature. The results
clearly show that the particle size of the CuO
nanoparticles can be controlled simply by the varia-
tion of the alcohothermal reaction temperature.
When the alcohothermal reaction was carried out
at a higher temperature of 1808C, remarkable changes
in the XRD pattern for sample S5 was observed in Fig. 2. TEM micrograph of the CuO nanoparticles =100,000.
Fig. 1d. Obviously, all characteristic diffraction peaks prepared by the alcohothermal method at 1508C.
 Z. Hong et al.r Materials Letters 52 (2002) 3438 37

XPS is a powerful technique for surface composi- main Cu 2p 3r2 peak, with decrease in size. This
tional studies of the nano-materials. XPS survey observation may be attributed to the size effect asso-
scans did not show any impurity in all as-prepared ciated with the present alcohothermally derived CuO
samples, which further confirmed the high purity nanoparticles.
nature for the alcohothermally derived CuO nanopar- Apparently, the present alcohothermal route may
ticles. Fig. 3 exhibits the Cu 2p 3r2 spectra for CuO be extended to the synthesis of other fundamentally
nanoparticles prepared at 908C, 1108C and 1508C, important nano-sized transition metal oxides such as
respectively. For comparison, the Cu 2p XPS level ZnO, etc. This method is attractive since it offers
for CuO bulk powder is also presented in Fig. 3d. In simple way to obtain oxide nanoparticles with vari-
general, XPS core lines are much broader for CuO able mean diameters. Moreover, this new synthesis
nanoparticles. It is well known that large number of route allows the attainment of a very high product
atoms reside on the surfaces of nanoparticle, leading yield under mild reaction conditions. In the present
to wider peaks large full width at half maximum. in paper, we have successfully demonstrated that CuO
photoemission spectra. nanoparticles having size between ; 2 and 6 nm
As shown in Fig. 3a, the Cu2q peak for sample could be synthesized using the alcohothermal route.
S1 lies at 935.2 eV, with two shake-up satellites at In our case, the reaction temperature is a very impor-
about 7.2 and 9.8 eV higher in binding energy than tant factor that should be considered in the alco-
that of the main peak. The existence of strong satel- hothermal synthesis of CuO nanoparticles. We have
lite features for Cu 2p rules out the possibility of found that when the synthesis temperature was be-
presence of Cu 2 O phase w9x. Thus, the XPS results low 908C, the formation rate of CuO was very slow
clearly proved that the sample is composed of CuO. and the reaction is not complete. For example, the
The main Cu 2p 3r2 features for samples S2 and S4 yield is only about 30% after reaction for 20 h when
are shown in Fig. 3b and c, respectively. A subtle reaction was performed at 908C. On the other hand,
increase in binding energy has been observed in the if the temperature was raised to above 1808C, the
reducing alcohol would readily reduced the CuII. to
metallic copper nanoparticles with a relatively large
size of 54.1 nm.
At reaction temperatures between 1108C and
1508C, the alcohothermal reaction to the CuO
nanoparticles is complete, as can be evidenced by the
colorless of the mother liquid after the alcohothermal
synthesis reaction. It should be noted that the present
reaction could be taken as the alcohothermally as-
sisted AdecompositionB of copper acetate to CuO in
presence of ethanol alcohol. Considering the present
reaction temperature for the formation of CuO is
considerably lower than that for the directly thermal
decomposition of copper acetate to CuO in air w10x,
the role of the organic solvent of ethanol is of
critically importance for the present low temperature
decomposition of CuOAc. 2 to CuO. Under alco-
hothermal conditions, the esterification reaction is
readily occurred between OAc.y and ethanol. In
fact, we do have detected the formation of ethyl
acetate in the reacted solvents by a GC with FID
Fig. 3. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopic Cu 2p 3r 2 level of CuO
detector. As a result, the thermal AdecompositionB of
nanoparticles prepared at different temperatures: a. 908C; b. copper acetate to CuO could proceed at a much
1108C; c. 1508C; and d. CuO bulk powder. lower temperature under alcohothermal conditions.
38 Z. Hong et al.r Materials Letters 52 (2002) 3438

4. Conclusions References

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support from the National Natural Science Founda-
tion of China and the Foundation of State Key
Laboratory of Coal Conversion.