Amorphous tungstate precursor route to nanostructured tungsten oxide film with electrochromic property

Electrochromic tungsten oxide (WO3) films on ITO glass were fabricated by spin-coating with a tungsten peroxy acid solution, which was prepared by adding an equivolume mixture of hydrogen peroxide and glacial acetic acid to tungsten metal powder. The structural evolution of the tungstate precursor upon heat treatment was studied by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) analyses, which indicated that the as-synthesized tungstate transformed into nanocrystalline WO3 upon heating. It is, therefore, quite clear that as-synthesized tungstate can be a good precursor for electrochromic WO3 films. A series of WO3 thin films were prepared on ITO glass by spin-coating with different concentrations of tungsten peroxy acid solution and then post-annealing at various temperatures. Depending on the concentration of the tungstate coating solution (200-500 mg mL(-1)) and the annealing temperature (100-300 degrees C), the thickness and WO3 content as well as the electrochromic properties of WO3 films can be controlled. As a result, the optimum fabrication conditions were determined to be a tungstate solution concentration of 300-400 mg mL(-1) and a post-annealing temperature of 200 degrees C. Finally, an inorganic-inorganic hybrid electrochromic device (ECD) composed of optimized WO3 and Prussian Blue (PB) with desirable coloration efficiency was successfully developed.