TAILORING ZNO-CNT NANOCOMPOSITES VIA CO-PRECIPITATION FOR ADVANCED BIOTECHNOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS: A SYNERGISTIC APPROACH TO ENHANCED BIOCOMPATIBILITY AND PHOTOCATALYTIC EFFICIENCY
Oudjertli Salah
Abstract: Zinc oxide has been studied for long enough that its core properties are well established antibacterial activity, photocatalytic response under UV, reasonable biocompatibility. What changes when you add carbon nanotubes to it is worth examining carefully, because the improvements are not marginal. The composites in this work were made by co-precipitation. The method is straightforward: ZnO and CNT structures nucleate and grow together from a shared precursor solution, which gives a more homogeneous integration of the two phases than post-synthesis mixing ever does. It is also cheap and scalable, which matters if the goal is to produce material in quantities useful for real applications. The characterization covered three areas: structure, electrical properties, and biological response. Electrically, the ZnO-CNT composite showed nearly three times the conductivity of pure ZnO. That improvement comes from the CNT network percolating through the ZnO matrix once the tubes are present at sufficient loading and distributed homogeneously enough, they form continuous conductive pathways that the ZnO alone cannot provide. Biologically, cell viability assays showed consistent improvement for the composite over pure ZnO across all tested concentrations. Photocatalytically, the composite degraded methyl orange to 97% or above within 100 minutes under 365 nm UV irradiation. Pure ZnO under the same conditions reached around 40%. That is not a small difference. Taken together, these results point toward a material that is genuinely multifunctional not just ZnO with slightly better numbers, but a composite where the CNT addition changes what the material can do. Biosensing platforms, drug delivery carriers, tissue engineering scaffolds, and environmental remediation are the obvious directions. Co-precipitation gives a practical route to get there without exotic equipment or expensive precursors, which keeps the path from laboratory result to scaled production shorter than most nanocomposite synthesis routes allow.
Keywords: CNTs doped ZnO, Co-Precipitation, Biocompatibility, Electrical Conductivity, Photocatalytic
DOI: 10.24874/PES08.03A.004
Recieved: 22.04.2026 Revised: 23.07.2026 Accepted: 18.08.2026
UDC:
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