Morphology Controlled Synthesis of ZnO Nanostructures on Different Substrates

Owing to its special photoelectric properties, ZnO nanostructrues have attracted extensive attention. Here we reported a study on the effect of substrates and seeding layers’ thickness on the morphology of the resultant ZnO nanostructures. The atomic layer deposition (ALD) was used to pre-synthesized seed layers on different substrates, including polyethylene terephthalate (PET), graphene/PET, Ag/PET, Al/PET and Al2O3/PET. Chemical solution route was employed to synthesize ZnO nanostructures. When the thickness of seed layers was 10 nm, nanorods, nanowalls and nanosheets were obtained. Nevertheless, when the thickness of seed layer was increased to 100 nm, well-aligned ZnO nanorods with homogeneous dimension were achieved on all the studied substrates. The possible growth mechanism of ZnO nanostructure was discussed and a feasible way to control the morphology and structure of ZnO was proposed.