Research on nanomaterials has been revolutionized in the last few years because of the attractive properties they have in comparison to the bulk phase of similar materials. These properties are physical, chemical, catalytic and optical. Among these nanomaterials, the metal oxide nanostructures have become of particular interest to scientists for the development of different optical, biochemical and biomedical nanodevices. In the present research work using the advantageous features of nanotechnology, high performance nanodevices for optoelectronics with a wide band gap compound nanostructure and highly sensitive sensor devices have been demonstrated. The nanotechnology is used to fabricate sensitive and precise nanodevices based on nanomaterials for the application of sensing. Among metal oxide nanostructures, ZnO, CuO and NiO are attractive materials because of their unique properties; their high surface area to volume ratio, their energy band gap of 3.37 eV, 1.2 eV and 3.7 eV, respectively, biocompatibility, high electron mobility, fast electron transfer rate and they are environmental-friendly in many applications. When used in sensor devices, nanomaterials have indicated high selectivity for possible use to detect the various analytes even in small volumes. Metal oxide nanostructures have shown to be good for optoelectronic nanodevices because of their electrical characteristics, high optical absorption and low-processing temperature. In this thesis, the synthesis of different morphologies of metal oxide semiconductor nanostructures and their composite using the hydrothermal method are demonstrated for various applications. This thesis is divided into three parts: In the first part of this research work, the fabrication of well-aligned ZnO nanorods using different concentrations of composite seed layer of inorganic and organic materials when using the hydrothermal growth method is presented. The effect of the composite seed layer on the alignment, density and optical properties of the grown ZnO nanorods is investigated (paper I). Utilizing the advantage of ZnO nanostructure, a comparative study of ZnO nanorods and thin films for chemical and biosensing application was carried out. The ZnO nanorods and thin films were functionalized with strontium ionophore membrane, immobilized the galactose oxidase and lactate oxidase for determining the strontium ions, D-galactose and L-lactic acid, respectively (paper II). In the second part, the effects of different urea concentrations on the morphology of CuO nanostructures is studied as described in paper III. Moreover, CuO nanoflowers were functionalized with cadmium ion ionophore for the detection of Cd ions, while CuO nanosheets were grown by the low temperature growth method and were used for the development of a nonenzymatic glucose sensor, respectively (Paper IV). In the last part of this thesis, composite nanostructures of CuO/ZnO and NiO/ZnO were applied to develop dopamine sensor and fast sensitive UV photodetector, respectively. A nanohybrid of CuO/ZnO nanostructure was used as a non-enzymatic electrode to detect dopamine by cyclic voltammetry (CV) and amperometric techniques (Paper V). In paper VI, we have demonstrated a strong UV absorption from ZnO nano-sheets achieved by the supramoleculesassisted growth solution using the hydrothermal method. The synthesized nanomaterial was used in the fabrication of UV photodetector based on p-NiO/ n-ZnO heterostructures.
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