Date of Award

8-20-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Applied Science

First Advisor

John Nichols

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change has generated an ever-increasing global ecological, economic, and political disaster for the world. In order to contain the damage and bring atmospheric carbon under control, human use of non-renewable hydrocarbons as the primary source of fuels for transportation and electrical generation needs to be phased out at the earliest possible date. Renewable, clean energy generation is currently technologically feasible and could provide the means for decarbonization of the global energy economy, but has to overcome challenges related to the intermittency of production. Hydrogen gas is a clean burning, renewable, and highly flexible method of storing such energy production but currently is not economically viable, in part, because of the high cost of catalysts necessary to produce it from water. In this study, hot wire chemical vapor deposition, in which oxygen gas is flowed over hot tungsten filaments, is presented as a technique for producing tungsten oxide. WOx is an inexpensive alternative to noble metals in catalysts and can be used as a material in a photo electrochemical cell due to its photo activity, durability, and catalytic properties. HWCVD is used to create nanostructured films of WO3 and WO3−x and the properties of those films are characterized and discussed. Finally, phase diagrams for both crystal phase and morphology are presented and a proposed qualitative growth model discussed.

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