Preparation of high performance pure single phase VO 2 nanopowder by hydrothermally reducing the V 2O 5 gel

Abstract

The most important potential application for VO 2 is “smart windows”. Producing polymer—VO 2 composite film is a practicable alternative for PVD film for windows retrofitting. Here the main work should be concentrated on preparing functional filler—VO 2. In this paper, high quality single crystal VO 2 nanopowder and the composite film coated with this powder had been prepared by a novel and facile route. A new vanadium precursor— V 2 O 5 · n H 2 O sol was fabricated by the dissolution reaction of V 2O 5 in H 2O 2. Adopting this sol, VO 2 powder with an average size less than 20 nm and narrower size distribution was obtained by pre-reduction and hydrothermal treatment. The as-prepared powder showed excellent optical properties in the composite film. The films reached a sufficiently high luminous transmittance (45–60%) and keeping thermochromic effect in infrared area very well—an abrupt transmittance change greater than 50% with the phase transition was observed. Its optical properties are comparable with high quality single layer VO 2 film deposited by PVD method. The as-prepared nanopowder has a phase transition temperature ( τ c ) about 55.5 °C and it can be tuned down to ambient by slight tungsten doping without deteriorating the thermochromic properties, which made this powder very suitable for practical application. Based on our experiments, the τ c reduction efficiency of tungsten was about −21.96 K/at.% w in the doping range from 0 to 2.5 at.% w.