A facile one-pot solution-phase route to synthesizing anovel composite hierarchical hollow structure: W18O49/WO2 Hollow Nanourchins

To date, nanostructured tungsten oxides with a variety of stoichiometries, such as WO3, WO2.9, W18O49, and WO2, have been prepared, because they are promising candidates for applications such as gas sensors, photocatalysts, electrochromic devices, and field emission devices. Among them, W18O49 and WO2 have been widely studied due to their outstanding chemical sensing, catalytic, and electron emissive properties. Here we report, for the first time, a one-pot solution-phase route to synthesizing a novel composite hierarchical hollow structure without adding catalysts, surfactants, or templates. The products, consisting of a WO2 hollow core sphere surrounded by a W18O49 nanorod shell (yielding a sea urchin-like structure), were generated as discrete structures via Ostwald ripening. To our knowledge, this type of composite hierarchical core/shell structure has not been reported previously. The morphological evolution and the detailed growth mechanism were carefully studied. We also demonstrate that the size of the hollow urchins is readily tunable by controlling the reactant concentrations.Interestingly, although bulk tungsten oxides are weakly paramagnetic or diamagnetic, the as-prepared products show unusual ferromagnetic behavior atroom temperature. The urchin structures also show a very high Brunauer-Emmet-Teller (BET) surface area, suggesting that they may potentially be applied to chemical sensor or effective catalyst technologies.