The Use of Pistachio Pollen for the Production of Nanostructured Porous Nickel Oxide

Natural biotemplates — such as bacteria, fungi and viruses — are used in nanostructured metal oxide production. The pollen can be found abundantly in nature, and their microcapsules can be easily isolated from the pollen by chemical treatments. To date, pollen microcapsules are mostly used as drug carriers and catalytic agent templates. In the present study, nanoporous-structured nickel oxide is produced using Pistachio pollen microcapsules. The raw pollen, chemically treated pollen and metal-coated pollen were characterized using scanning electron microscopy, Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) surface area analysis, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), differential thermal analysis (DTA) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques. The natural Pistachio pollen which were procured from Gaziantep, Turkey, are spherical, with a diameter of approximately 23[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]m. The maximum surface area obtained for nickel oxide-coated microcapsules is 228.82[Formula: see text]m 2 /g. This result shows that Pistachio pollen are an excellent candidate for the production of porous nanostructured materials for supercapacitor electrodes.