Abstract
Shock wave recovery experiments have been performed on a few nano-materials so far and the results show that it is very much possible to obtain tangible evidence for the stability of the materials at exposed conditions which is similar to that of the one prevailing at extreme environmental conditions. The title material of ZnO nanorods (ZnO NRs) have been synthesized by hydrothermal method and shock wave recovery experiment has been employed for ZnO NRs by utilizing a table-top pressure driven shock tube. For the present research work, we intend to investigate the optical and molecular vibrational characteristics of ZnO NRs at shocked conditions using UV-DRS and Raman spectroscopy, respectively. UV-DRS spectroscopic study reveals that the title material is highly stable in the visible region whereas its transmittance is slightly reduced in the UV region. The optical absorption of ZnO NRs is found to be increasing from 0.64 to 0.95 with respect to the number of shock pulses. The plot of the direct band gap shows that no phase transformation has occurred in ZnO NRs. Raman spectroscopic studies also reveal that ZnO NRs have stable crystalline system against the impact of shock waves. Due to the outstanding optical and structural properties, ZnO NRs are suggested for the space-related device applications.