Development of photo catalytic active building materials using zno nanorods

In many urban cities, the pollutants concentration at street level is quite high because of the dispersion of the exhaust generated by a large number of vehicles is hindered by surrounding tall buildings. Control of these pollutions has become a pressing need for the well-being of society. Many methods have been developed to control these pollutions. Currently, there is an increasing interest in the control of urban pollution level by using construction materials containing photocatalytic nanomaterials, without changing original performance of the building structure. The photocatalytic materials used in the building materials for the purification process are efficient to remove the contaminants such as NOx and VOC. Many works have been concerned with the application of different types of nanomaterials in photocatalytic processes. This paper presents the systematic study on the photocatalytic activity of ZnO nanorods on construction materials. In this method, ZnO nanorods were successfully synthesized by a wet chemical route. Systematic experiments were carried out to investigate the photocatalytic activity of the samples. The prepared samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM). It has been found that the ZnO nanoflowers contain many radial nanorods with the diameter of 100 nm and the length of 1–1.5 μm and these ZnO single-crystalline nanorods with wurtzite structure grow along the [ 0 0 1] direction. The formation mechanism of ZnO nanoflowers and nanorods was initially interpreted in terms of the general theory of the crystal nucleation and crystal growth direction. ZnO with flower-like morphology exhibited improved ability on the photocatalytic degradation