Synthesis and humidity sensing properties of feather-like ZnO nanostructures with macroscale in shape

Feather-like ZnO nanostructures with macroscale in shape have been synthesized via the vapor-phase transport method with Cu catalyst at 900 °C. Two basic parts build this novel feather-like structure: a long central trunk with length several millimeters and lots of secondary branches composed of well-oriented nanorods. The humidity sensor based on as-synthesized product shows high sensitivity and fast response time due to unique structure of the ZnO feathers with large surface-to-volume ratio. It can be found that the resistance of the ZnO materials decreases obviously with increasing relative humidity (RH) at room temperature (26 °C). The results demonstrate that these ZnO nanostructures are potential to be used as effective and high performance humidity sensors.