Proceedings of September Meeting 2016 (NFM16)
Publication date: 14th June 2016
Due to its high energy density, hydrogen could play an important role to store chemical energy. To produce hydrogen in large quantities “artificial leaf”-type structures can be used converting solar light into hydrogen by photoelectrochemical decomposition of water. Since this process is most efficiently working under acidic conditions in electrolyzing systems, semiconducting materials are required to efficiently absorb sunlight and generate electron-hole pairs, the energy of which must be high enough to split water. In addition, cheap and abundant electro-catalysts are needed to lower the overvoltages at cathode and anode.
To replace costly platinum as most efficient HER catalyst attempts were made for more than a decade to substitute this noble metal by molybdenum sulfides. It has been shown that nanoparticles of MoS2 are most efficient when they consist of three to four S-Mo-S slabs deposited on a suitable support, e.g. MoO3‑x, multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) or activated carbon paper [1, 2].
In this contribution we report on the deposition of (NH4)2Mo3S13 on MoS2 and CuBi2O4 photoelectrodes. Highly porous MoS2 films used as substrates were deposited by reactive magnetron sputtering using a Mo target in an Ar/H2S atmosphere. Best results were obtained after drop casting of a solution of ammonium thiomolybdate on a sputtered MoS2 film deposited on a Ti foil. The modified electrode exhibits an overvoltage of 220 mV at a current density of 10 mA/cm2, but no photoactivity was found. In contrast, films of CuBi2O4 produced by drop casting showed an increase of photocurrent density under 1 sun (AM1.5) illumination after deposition of a thin film of (NH4)2Mo3S13 (20 µg/cm2). Possible explanations include passivation of surface states on the CuBi2O4 film surface combined with the catalytic activity of thiomolybdate.
References:
[1] Diana Stellmach, Peter Bogdanoff, Onno Gabriel, Bernd Stannowski, Rutger Schlatmann, Roel van de Krol, Sebastian Fiechter: in Materials and processes for energy: communicating currentresearch and technological developments (ed.: A. Mendez-Vilas), Formatex Research Center, Badajoz, 2013, 880-886.
[2] Jesse D. Benck, Sang Chul Lee, Kara D. Fong, Jakob Kibsgaard, Robert Sinclair, Thomas F.Jaramillo, Adv. Energy Mater. 4, 2014, 1400739-1400739.
[3] Sean P. Berglund, Fatwa F. Abdi, Peter Bogdanoff, Abdelkrim Chemseddine, Dennis Friedrich, and Roel van de Krol, Chem. Mat. in revision.
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