Proceedings of nanoGe Fall Meeting 2018 (NFM18)
Publication date: 6th July 2018
Solar water splitting is a promising way to sustainably produce hydrogen as a clean and storable fuel. We recently reported the application of thin-film silicon multi-junction based photocathodes with a solar-to-hydrogen (STH) efficiency of 9.5% employing noble metal catalysts.[1] As practical applications critically rely on approaches that are scalable to large areas, we investigated different approaches on the upscaling of multi-junction photovoltaic cells for water splitting. We demonstrated the successful implementation in a photovoltaic-biased electrosynthetic (PV-EC) device for an active area of 64 cm². A long-term stable STH efficiency of 4.8% and 2.1% was achieved employing Pt/IrOX or Ni/Ni as respective gas evolution reaction catalysts.[2] Regarding the cost-effectiveness of this technology, especially on large areas, clearly low cost, well working, earth abundant alternatives would be the first choice. In the present study we prepared such catalysts for the application on appropriate electrode size and implement them into our up-scaled PV-EC device.
We chose NiFeOX as oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalyst and NiMo as hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) catalyst based on literature results[3] about the good performance and low overpotentials of these metal compounds. Both materials can be readily prepared via electro-deposition. While the catalysts reported in literature are usually optimized on a laboratory scale device area of less than 1 cm2, we focused on the deposition on considerably larger areas to match with the application in our 64 cm² PV-EC module. We investigated different deposition modes with varied compound compositions and evaluated the performance as catalysts in our up-scaled PV-EC device.
The NiMo/NiFeOX catalyst pair showed excellent catalytic activity, which even outperforms the noble metal based Pt/IrOX materials, yielding STH = 5.1% in combination with a triple junction thin film silicon based solar cell in our up-scaled PV-EC module.
[1] F. Urbain, et al., Energy Environ. Sci. 2016, 9, 145.
[2] J.-P. Becker, et al., J. Mater. Chem. A 2017, 5, 4818.
[3] C. C. L. McCrory, et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2015, 137, 4347–4357.
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