Well-aligned
honeycomb-designed layers of potassium tungstate (K0.33WO3.165) were successfully fabricated by spray
deposition and microsphere lithography using polystyrene (PS) colloidal
crystals as templates. A densely packed monolayer of monodisperse
PS microspheres was formed on a silica glass surface, using the Langmuir–Blodgett
thin film technique. Subsequently, a (NH4)10W12O41·5H2O-KCl aqueous solution
was sprayed as a micromist on the PS templates. While the K0.33WO3.165 crystal layers were synthesized by chemical reaction
between W and K sources during the heating, the PS templates were
thermally decomposed, generating an inverse opal surface structure
where the interstitial space of the densely hexagonal packed PS microspheres
had been. Numerous hexagonal rodlike crystals were grown on the honeycomb-designed
layer of K0.33WO3.165. X-ray diffraction analysis,
energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy analyses, and X-ray photoelectron
spectroscopy were performed to analyze the combined one-dimensional
and three-dimensional honeycomb-designed structure.