Publication date: 27th March 2025
The main objective of a solar cell is the generation of energetically and physically separated electrons and holes. These charge carriers will recombine in the external circuit providing electrical power. This separation of charge carriers is achieved by incorporating charge-selective contacts, called Hole Transport Layer (HTL) and Electron Transport Layer (ETL) respectively. The use of HTL and ETL is already widely established in almost all solar cell technologies.
The principle of operation of a photocatalytic system dedicated to the generation of hydrogen can also be described in an analogous way to a photovoltaic solar cell. Despite this analogy, the use of HTL and ETL is not well established in the manufacture of photocatalytic systems.
In this presentation we will describe the parallelism between the operating principle of a solar cell and a photocatalytic system and we will show that the incorporation of selective contacts improves the efficiency of photocatalytic systems based on Titanium oxide.