Abstract
This research consists of two sections: (1) silver oxide nanoparticles and (2) silver oxide nanoparticles integrated with zinc oxide nanorods. The first section used wet chemical synthesis method to synthesize silver oxide nanoparticles with controllable facets. The silver oxide nanoparticles were synthesized by mixing silver nitride, ammonium nitrate and sodium hydroxide in a fixed ratio of 1:2:11.8. Silver oxide nanoparticles with different shapes such as cube, truncated cube, rhombicuboctahedra, truncated octahedral, octahedral and hexapods were acquired. Among different facets, ( 100 ) facet was found to exhibit the most efficient photodegradation ability of methylene orange dye. The second section adopted photochemical synthesis method to integrate silver oxide nanoparticles with zinc oxide nanorods. The resulted nanostructures were silver oxide nanoparticles on ZnO nanorods. In addition, there were some silver metals precipitating on silver oxide nanoparticles. The silver metals help to stabilize silver oxide by preventing it from decomposition under UV light irradiation. The formation of silver metals and photodecomposition of silver oxide will reach a balance. The silver oxide/silver metal - zinc oxide nano-composite shows high methylene orange dye photodegradation efficiency under UV light irradiation. Key words: wet chemical synthesis method, facets, photodegradation, photochemical synthesis method, nano-composite