Thermochromic vanadium dioxide (VO2) exhibits a semi-conducting to metallic phase transition at about 68°C, involving strong variations in electrical and optical properties. A simple method was proposed to prepare VO2 thin films from easily gained V2O5 thin films. The detailed thermodynamic calculation was done and the results show that V2O5 will decompose to VO2 when the post annealing temperature reaches 550°C at the atmospheric pressure of less than 0.06Pa. The initial V2O5 films were prepared by sol-gel method on fused-quartz substrates. Different post annealing conditions were studied. The derived VO2 thin film samples were characterized using X-ray diffraction and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The electrical resistance and infrared emissivity of VO2 thin films under different temperatures were measured. The results show that the VO2 thin film derived from the V2O5 thin film annealed at 550°C for 10 hours is pure dioxide of vanadium without other valences. It was observed that the resistance of VO2 thin film with thickness about 600nm can change by 4 orders of magnitude and the 7.5-14μm emissivity can change by 0.6 during the phase transition.
