The synthesis of zinc oxide nanoparticles with banana peels extract from Musa Acuminata: effect on precursor concentration and temperature: article

This paper studies the synthesis of zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) by using Musa Acuminata (Pisang Abu) extract peels as a reducing agent. This method can be considered as an alternative in synthesizing ZnO NPs which environmentally friendly among other synthesizing method. Furthermore, this method does not involve any toxic chemicals, possessed strong adsorption ability and exhibits high catalytic efficiency. In the synthesizing procedure, zinc acetate dehydrate was used as precursor solution and sodium hydroxide to adjust the pH of the banana peels extract and zinc acetate dehydrate mixture. The concentration of the zinc acetate dehydrate and the temperature of the synthesis procedure were varied from 0.01M – 0.2M and 50oC – 90oC respectively. The synthesized ZnONPs were characterized using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), UVVisible Spectrometer (UV-Vis), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET), Zeta-Potential and X-Ray Diffraction (XRD). The band gap energy was found in the range of 3.28 – 3.45 eV meanwhile the XRD analysis showed the crystalline structure of the ZnONPs is hexagonal wurtzite structure with a crystallite size range of 14 -17 nm. The BET results showed the particles sizes of ZnONPs is between 40 to 110 nm for both parameters. The Zeta-Potential result showed that the ZnONPs size exceeds the average nanoparticles due to agglomeration of the particles.