Proceedings of nanoGe September Meeting 2017 (NFM17)
Publication date: 20th June 2016
To enhance the performance of photoelectrodes for use in solar to fuel devices, catalysts are often applied to the surface of the photoabsorber materials. Earth-abundant catalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), for example Ni-Mo, are generally opaque and require high mass loadings to obtain high catalytic activity, which in turn leads to parasitic light absorption and thus limits H2 production. Therefore, we show the fabrication of a highly efficient HER photocathode by decoupling light absorption and catalytic activity on the microscale on a Si microwire array photocathode. Hereto, Ni-Mo was spatioselectively electrodeposited on the top 2 to 36 μm of 40 µm long Si microwires with a radial n+/p junction. This was achieved by controlled etching of the SiO2 coating from the top part of the microwires, followed by selective electrodeposition of the catalyst material on the freshly exposed emitter. This configuration allowed the application of high mass loadings of the Ni-Mo catalyst while retaining a high photocurrent for the underlying PV cell. More specifically, catalytic activity and light absorption were investigated independently to understand in which situations one of these factors is limiting the device performance. This facilitated the fabrication of microwire array devices which exhibited a near-ideal short-circuit photocurrent density of 35.5 mA/cm2, a photovoltage of 495 mV, and a fill factor of 62% under AM 1.5G illumination, which results in a photon-to-hydrogen energy efficiency of 10.9%.
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