Proceedings of MATSUS Spring 2024 Conference (MATSUS24)
Publication date: 18th December 2023
Hydrogen produced from sustainable energy sources is believed to play a key role in the transition towards a sustainable energy system, yet the global production quantities of sustainable hydrogen are still negligible. Direct conversion of solar electrical energy to chemical energy by the generation of hydrogen in a photoelectrochemical cell is one promising approach to built photoelectrochemical water splitting devices. Such fully integrated, monolithic systems based on III-V photoelectrodes have a potentially lower balance of system cost compared to more conventional decoupled PV-electrolysis approaches and have already shown to be highly efficient. [1,2]
For the processing of III-V photoelectrodes to form a photoelectrochemical cell, a clean and reproducible handling is a prerequisite to control the semiconductor electrolyte interface, which plays an essential role in the performance and stability of the device. Therefore a new Schlenk cell approach is presented, which provides a flexible setup for preparation and measurement of photoelectrodes. The setup has already enabled solar-to-hydrogen efficiencies of 18% combined with improved stabilities of photocathodes on larger areas after the surface functionalisation and deposition of a Rh catalyst layer in the Schlenk cell. [3] In further studies, the transferability of the method to other more abundant catalysts is investigated. The catalyst deposition is enabled by using light and potential pulse sequences to achieve deposition of nanoparticles from an aqueous solution of noble metal salts. The photoelectrochemical deposition routine influences the size distribution, the absolute size and thereby the transparency of the applied catalyst layer. For characterisation of the catalyst performance, the measurement setup is further improved to e.g. allow for gas separation.
This work was supported by the German Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), projects ‘‘H2Demo’’ (no. 03SF0619K) and ‘‘NETPEC’’ (no. 01LS2103A), as well as the German Research Foundation (DFG) under project number 434023472. The Schlenk cell was manufactured in pleasant cooperation with the University of Tübingen glassblower Thomas Nieß. The absorbers were kindly provided by AZUR SPACE.
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