There is a growing interest in developing new advanced materials such as 1-D nanomaterials owing to their distinctive geometries that offer high surface area-to-volume ratio and quantum confinement effect. In particular, titanium dioxide and tungsten oxide nanorods have been paid considerable attention for their unique applications including photocatalysts, catalysts, sensors, solar cells, hydrogen storage devices, batteries and etc.

While titanium dioxide and tungsten oxide nanorods have been synthesised by a plethora methods, wet chemical techniques provide versatile routes with the advantages of mild synthetic conditions and precise control of size, shape and dimension. To our best knowledge, the application of wet chemical techniques to assemble nanorods into well-organised sructures without the use of surfactants or templates has not been reported. Here, we report a simple one step method to fabricate highly-ordered titanium dioxide and tungsten oxide nanorods.

Preliminary results showed that well-aligned titanium dioxide nanorods with different aspect ratios and shapes can be obtained by altering the pH and aging conditions. Similarly, by simple manipulation of pH, concentration of inorganic ions and type of organic species, an urchin-like tungsten oxide nanorods with controlled aspect ratios can be attained. In this work, we also demonstrated that the as-synthesised metal oxides nanorods were highly active when used as photocatalysts for environment remediation. It is expected that the novel method will offer the opportunity for large scale production of well-aligned metal oxides nanorods.