A simple and low-cost combustion method to prepare monoclinic VO₂ with superior thermochromic properties

In this approach, the VO₂ nanoparticles have been successfully fabricated via combusting the low-cost precursor solution consisted of NH₄VO₃, C₂H₆O₂ and C₂H₅OH. By the XRD, TEM and XPS analysis, it can be found that the synthetic monoclinic VO₂ is single crystal and no impurity is defined. After dispersing the VO₂ nanoparticles into the polymer, the solar modulation of VO₂-based composite film is up to 12.5% with luminous transmission and haze around 62.2% and 0.5%, respectively. In other words, the composite films show high performance of thermochromic properties. This could open an efficient way to fabricate low-cost and large-scale VO₂ (M) nanoparticles and thermochromic films.