Exploration of the thermal decomposition of zinc oxalate by experimental and computational methods

Zinc oxalate dihydrate has been synthesized by precipitation method and characterized by FT-IR, XRD and SEM-EDAX. The kinetics of dehydration and decomposition were studied by non-isothermal DSC technique in the N2 atmosphere at different heating rates: 4, 6, 8 and 10 K min−1. The product of thermal decomposition, ZnO has been characterized by UV, TEM, SEM-EDAX and XRD and found that the particles are in nanometer range. The activation energy for thermal dehydration and decomposition was calculated by various isoconversional methods. Furthermore, structure and reactivity of zinc oxalate have also been investigated using B3LYP/631+g (d, p) level of theory with the help of Gaussian 09W software. The theoretical investigation indicates that most probably the compound decomposes to ZnO along with the evolution of CO2 and CO.