Proceedings of nanoGe September Meeting 2017 (NFM17)
Publication date: 20th June 2016
Photoelectrochemical (PEC) solar water splitting is a propitious approach to providing a clean and proficient way to overcome the limited supply of fossil fuels. However, key challenges are to achieve a stable PEC reaction in either strongly acidic or basic electrolytes without degradation of photoelectrodes. Here we present a highly active photocathode for solar H2 production, consisting of electrodeposited cuprous oxide, which was protected against photocathodic decomposition in water by a thin layer of solution-based carbon material coatings such as functionalized carbon, g-C3N4, and RGO and subsequent carbonization strategies. As the minority carrier diffusion length in electrodeposited Cu2O (20-100nm) is incommensurate with the light absorption depth near the bandgap, aspect ratios of 50-250 would be necessary to collect the theoretical maximum photocurrent. This requires the use of a conformal coating to stabilize the surface. The roles of photoelectrode protected different carbon materials were investigated, and in the best case electrodes showed photocurrents up to 5.5 mA/cm-2 and 8 mA/cm-2 at a potential of 0V and -0.25V vs RHE at pH 5.5 respectively. We believe that the facile method presented in this work is a general approach that can address the stability issue of many nonstable photoelectrodes and thus has the potential to make a significant input in the broad field of energy conversion.
References:
1. C. G. Morales-Guio, S. D. Tilley, H. Vrubel, M. Graetzel, and X. Hu, Nature Communications, 5 (2014).
2. Z. Zhang, R. Dua, L. Zhang, H. Zhu, H. Zhang, and P. Wang, ACS Nano, 7 (2013)
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