Combustion synthesis and excellent photocatalytic degradation properties of W18O49

In this paper, one-dimensional W18O49 nanopowders were fabricated by a one-step solution combustion method using glycine as the fuel and a metal acid radical ion as the metal source. The morphologies and non-stoichiometric single-crystal phase of W18O49 can be controlled by changing the amount of the fuel. The nanoneedles had a large amount of defects such as oxygen vacancies. This characteristic resulted in an excellent visible light-driven photocatalytic performance that took about 50 min to degrade methylene blue (100 mL; 40 mg L−1) under visible light. The interesting reaction mechanism of such needle-like W18O49 and the photocatalytic mechanism are studied in this paper.