Considering the current interest in the preparation of modified surfaces with fixed nanostructures, in this research, the hot water treatment was chosen as a simple and efficient procedure for the direct growth of ZnO nanostructures (ZnO NSs) on the metallic surface. To improve the method and reduce the cost of experiments, the commercial galvanized steel (steel containing a thin layer of zinc) was used as the base substrate. The use of the galvanized steel as an inexpensive and available metal surface has advantages compared to the pure Zn foil (used in other researches). In addition, in the present work, the effective pretreatment of the base substrate surface by applying the chemical etching under the low intensity ultrasonic irradiation facilitated the reaction progress (Zn→ZnO) in a shorter time and relatively low temperature in comparison to many reports. To find the effect of acoustic energy on the final ZnO morphology, the hot water treatment was carried out under conventional and sonochemical conditions. Finally, as a practical application, resulting surfaces were coated with electroless Ni-P deposits and the effect of as-grown ZnO NSs (as the sublayer) on improvement in the corrosion protection of binary Ni-P deposits was evaluated by the electrochemical method.

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