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Nanocrystals of ZnO have been produced by an alkoxide based synthesis involving diethylzinc, tert -butyl alcohol, ethanol, and water. The resulting ZnO is in the form of a powder made up of zincite crystallites in the size range of 3−5 nm. These crystallites aggregate together to form larger spherical particles. These spherical particles have been studied by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and Brunauer−Emmet−Teller (BET) methods and were found to contain many pores and tunnels. It is because of this that an uncharacteristically high surface area is found, averaging about 120 m 2 /g. As seen with other metal oxides, once they are made as nanoparticles, their reactivity is greatly enhanced. This is thought to be due to morphological differences, whereas larger crystallites have only a small percentage of reactive sites on the surface, smaller crystallites will possess much higher surface concentration of such sites. Elemental analysis, X-ray diffraction, and infrared spectroscopy have been used to characterize this nanoparticle ZnO, and reactions with CCl 4, SO 2, and paraoxon have demonstrated significantly enhanced reactivity and/or capacity compared with common forms of ZnO powders.
Carnes et al. (Sat,) studied this question.