Proceedings of September Meeting 2016 (NFM16)
Publication date: 14th June 2016
Si has a bandgap of 1.1 eV, is being used as a material in photovoltaic (PV) cells intensively for many decades, is earth abundant, stable, and a non-toxic semiconductor. The knowledge gained in the fields of nano/micro-engineering of Si, has stimulated the fabrication of complex Si solar cells, which may be used for solar-to-fuel devices.
A considerable disadvantage of Si is its poor kinetics for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Si requires a large overpotential to drive the HER.To surpass this problem, Si requires a catalyst to achieve efficient solar energy conversion, which should preferably also be earth-abundant. As a disadvantage, earth-abundant catalysts are optically opaque and require high mass loadings (> 1 mg/cm2). Although, high mass-loadings give rise to high fill factors (FF), but lead to parasitic optical absorption losses and limit the photocurrent density (Jph).
The way to obtain high efficiencies of such systems (i.e. semiconductors coated with catalytic nanoparticles) is by decoupling the optical absorption and catalytic activity of the electrocatalyst, allowing for simultaneous achievement of high FF, Jph and Voc values. Here, we present how to overcome the above described problems with Si as light absorber and nickel-molybdenum (Ni-Mo) as co-catalyst, by fabricating Si micropillar PV cells with radial junctions and position selective deposition of high mass-loadings of catalyst.
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