A facile solution chemical route to self-assembly of CuS ball-flowers and their application as an efficient photocatalyst

Abstract

Ball-flower shaped CuS structures have been synthesized by using mixed copper chloride and thiourea in a simple hydrothermal process employing poly(vinylpyrrolidone) (PVP) as the surfactant. The morphological investigations by field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) reveal that the ball-flower shaped nanostructures are monodispersed in large quantities. The ball-flower shaped morphologies are strongly dependent on the different ratios of copper chloride to thiourea, the reaction temperature and reaction time. The possible growth mechanism of the formation of ball-flower shaped CuS products is discussed in detail. In addition, the photocatalytic activity of ball-flower shaped CuS architectures has been tested by the degradation of rhodamine B (RhB) under UV light irradiation, showing that the as-prepared ball-flower shaped CuS structures exhibit high photocatalytic activity for the degradation of RhB.

Synthesis of novel CuS with hierarchical structures and its application in lithium-ion batteries

“…Copper sulfide (CuS), as an important semiconductor material, exhibits many unusual physical and chemical properties and has great potential applications in numerous fields such as cathode material of lithium-ion batteries, solar controller and solar radiation absorber, nonlinear optical material, catalyst, super ionic material and superconductor at low temperature [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Since the particle sizes and shapes of materials affect their properties and potential applications, recently, various morphologies of copper sulfide have been synthesized, such as nanoparticles, nanowires, nanoplates, hollow spheres, snowflakes, especially some complex hierarchical micro-/nanostructures [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15].…”

Covellite CuS – Single crystal growth by chemical vapour transport (CVT) technique and characterization

“…Numerous research papers reporting synthesis of CuS in thin films [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18], nanoparticles [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30], micro-meter size morphologies [31,32], etc. forms have been reported.…”

Template free synthesis of CuS nanosheet-based hierarchical microspheres: an efficient natural light driven photocatalyst

“…[12][13][14] A diverse portfolio of hollow structures were prepared by template methods and typically physicochemical routes for CuS semiconductor. 15,16 However, the above-mentioned typical approaches to fabrication of hollow CuS architectures might inevitably increase reaction complexity, suffer tedious synthetic procedures, mostly cause impurities in the products. Currently, most of the obtained hollow spherical architectures have polycrystalline shells.…”