ZnO-nanoparticle-assembled cloth for flexible photodetectors and recyclable photocatalysts

Abstract

We reported the fabrication of a highly flexible, sensitive, and excellent reproducible photo-detector based on flexible nanoparticle-assembled ZnO cloth, which was synthesized via a carbon cloth templated hydrothermal method. The conductance of the device increased more than 600 times after UV irradiation. The response time and decay time were found to be around 3.2 s and 2.8 s, respectively, indicating fast photoresponse characteristics for the ZnO cloth photodetector. Besides, the free-standing ZnO cloth can be easily thrown into the wastewater solution and used as a high performance recyclable photocatalyst under light irradiation, which can photodegrade organic dyes such as methylene blue (MB) within a short time of 40 min. The ZnO cloth can be used repeatedly without any weight loss. Our work here opens up opportunities for the fabrication of many other flexible, lightweight, foldable, portable and high performance functional devices.