Synthesis and Characterization of NiO Nano-Spheres by Templating on Chitosan as a Green Precursor

In this study, nickel oxide was prepared through the calcination of extrusion dripped chitosan/nickel nitrate beads. The morphology and structural properties of the products were studied using various characterization techniques. Uniformly distributed nickel oxide was formed as observed from the studies of surface morphology where the processing parameters play a huge role on the resulting morphology. TEM results have shown that nickel oxide with crystallite sizes of 10-30 nm was obtained. The Fourier-transform infrared spectra studies show an intense peak at 525 cm(-1), which is attributed to the vibration of Ni-O bond. Furthermore, the XRD results show NiO diffraction peaks correspond to (111), (200), (220), (311), and (222) which indicates that a bunsenite structure with a face-centered cubic phase was produced in this study. The usage of 500 degrees C as the lower limit in this study is justified due to the complete removal of the templating material as seen in the thermalgravimetric analysis studies. Furthermore, it was obtained that the largest surface area of nickel oxide synthesized using this technique is 48.024 m(2)/g with pore sizes of 19.843 nm. The usage of chitosan as a green template for the synthesis of nanoparticles has shown promising results which allows a more economical and sustainable approach for the fabrication of nanomaterials.