Porous Tungsten Oxide: Recent Advances in Design, Synthesis, and Applications.

Tungsten oxide (WO3 ) has received ever more attention and has been highly researched over the last decade due to its being a low-cost transition metal semiconductor with tunable, yet widely stable, band gaps. This minireview briefly highlights the challenges in the design and synthesis of porous WO3 including methods, precursors, solvent effects, crystal phases, and surface activities of the porous WO3 base material. These topics are explored while also drawing a connection of how the morphology and crystal phase affect the band gap. The shifts in band gap not only impact the optical properties of tungsten but also allow tuning to operate on different energy levels, which makes WO3 highly desirable in many applications such as supercapacitors, batteries, solar cells, catalysts, sensors, smart windows, and bioapplications.