Low pressure thermal annealed fabrication of VO2 on glass with excellent optical properties

In this study, VO2 was deposited on glass through low pressure annealed metal vanadium thin film. The crystal structure, surface morphology and optical transmittance property of the film were characterized by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy and UV/VIS/NIR spectrophotometer, respectively. When the film thickness is higher than 88 nm, XRD showed that the deposited films appears only at 27.92° indexed to VO2 (011). The calculated grain sizes of VO2 increased from 33.6 nm to 39.2 nm with the increasing of film thickness. The thermal hysteresis showed that the phase transition temperature is in a range of 53–58 °C, which is much lower than that of single crystal VO2 (68 °C). In addition, the films exhibit the optimal thermochromic performance with the luminous transmittance of 48.2% and the solar modulation of 6.7%. This method revealed the facile fabrication of large scale high performance VO2 on glass for thermochromic based devices.