In this paper, thermal rectification phenomena from thermochromic materials are studied. A near-field thermal rectification structure consisting of two bulks separated by a vacuum gap is designed by using thermochromic materials of vanadium dioxide (VO2) and La0.7Ca0.15Sr0.15MnO3 (LCSMO). The origin of thermal rectification of such material assemblies is closely examined. The results indicate that the thermal rectification is attributed to the metal insulator transition from the thermochromic materials. For the case that the vacuum gap is 10 nm, the ratio of the heat flux for the forward biased case to that for the reverse biased case amounts to 8.7 for the thermal rectification structure consisting of VO2 and LCSMO. The results of this work may provide some guidance for the applications of thermal rectification in thermal management of nano/microscaled electronic devices. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.