“…Recently, much effort has been devoted to synthesizing unique CuO nanostructures, such as rods (Xu et al 2002), robbons (Liu and Zeng 2004;Gao et al 2009), wires (Su et al 2007), belts (Zhang et al 2008b), sheets (Zheng et al 2007), platelets (Zarate et al 2007), needles (Dar et al 2008), and tubes (Cho and Huh 2008). As one of the novel structures, flower-like CuO was expected to offer some exciting opportunities for some potential applications on electrochemistry (Pan et al 2007), sensors (Teng et al 2008), catalysis (Vaseem et al 2008), and field emission (Yu et al 2008). So far, a variety of approaches to fabricating flower-like CuO nanostructures have been developed, such as hydrothermal Teng et al 2008), solution-immersion (Pan et al 2007), hydrolysis (Zhu et al 2007), microwave-hydrothermal (Volanti et al 2007;Xia et al 2009), chemical precipitation (Zhang et al 2008a), thermal oxidation (Yu et al 2008) and solution-phase route (Yu et al 2009).…”