Nanostructured tungsten oxide is of great interest due to its broad range of applications such as gas sensors, photocatalysts, electrochromic devices, field-emission devices, and solar-energy devices. In this paper, De Zhang and co-workers in China and Australia report for the first time the synthesis of hierarchical Cu-doped tungsten oxide with distinguished photonic crystal (PC) structures by using Morpho butterfly wings as a hard template.
The gas sensing properties of the photonic replicas were tested for a range of gases and it was found that the Cu-doped tungsten oxide replicas showed much higher sensitivity to trimethylamine (TMA) than pure tungsten oxide and the replicas with PC structures possess even more enhanced sensitivity to TMA.
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Shenmin Zhu, Xinye Liu, Zhixin Chen, Chunjiao Liu, Chuanliang Feng, Jiajun Gu, Qinglei Liu and Di Zhang*
J. Mater. Chem., 2010, Advance Article DOI:10.1039/C0JM02113J, Paper
