Abstract:
The present work demonstrates that the unique properties of mesoporous transition
metal oxides enable the efficient synthesis of porous NiO, CuO, Fe2O3, Co3O4
sacrificial templating with NaCl. Mesoporous metal oxides; NiO, CuO, Fe2O3, and
Co3O4, templated by NaCl were synthesized successfully by using an evaporation
method, which was the principal development of methodology in this project. The
structural characterizations of these porous metal oxides were performed by using
XRPD, SEM, AFM and N2 adsorption techniques. Phase analysis, purity have been
confirmed by X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) which indicated that all the samples
are in single phase. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) elucidated the morphology
as cubic NiO, hexagonal CuO, cubic Fe2O3 and octahedral Co3O4 with average sizes
as102, 124, 350 and 275 nm, respectively. AFM study revealed the surface roughness
as 89.7, 8.80, 3.52 and 25.5 nm for NiO, CuO, Fe2O3, and Co3O4, respectively. N2
adsorption helped in finding the pore size and pore volume along with the type of
adsorption isotherm. The as-synthesized templated metal oxides were used as sensors
to find the sensitivity and selectivity against the different concentrations of sodium
chloride solution. Evidently, the sensor characteristic is linear with excellent
correlation (R2>0.95) within the concentration range 0 to 50 ppm.
Keywords. Molecular Imprinting, Salt Templated, NaCl sensor, BET, Evaporation
method.
