Publication date: 15th December 2014
The application of photoelectrochemistry for the fabrication of fuel is still limited due to rather low performance and high degradation of the electrode - electrolyte interface. It is well known that a large surface area of the electrode increases the number of reactions taking place at the interface and by this increases the overall solar to fuel conversion efficiency per unit area. In this study, we increase the surface area of the electrode – electrolyte interface by exposing the material to a high ion flux He plasma (ion flux ~ 1023 m-2 s-1) in the special designed Pilot plasma set-up of DIFFER. Earlier studies have shown that bulk material of Fe, W, and Mo can be well nanostructured [1,2]. We now found that also metal oxide thin films can be nanostructured without delamination from typical substrates used in photoelectrochemical solar fuel conversion research, i.e. F:SnO2 (FTO) on glass. We will show how the plasma conditions (ion flux, exposure time, temperature), the thin film material (Fe, W, Mo, Ti) and the kind of substrate influence the formation of the nanostructure of metal and metal oxide thin films due to plasma exposure. Photoelectrochemical measurements on bulk samples showed a five times higher photo-current of plasma nanostructured WO3 compared to dense and non-porous material [3]. On the thin films, we will elucidate both the impact of the nanostructure as well as possible plasma activation on the photoelectrochemical properties.
[1] De Temmerman et al., J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 30 (2012) 041306.
[2] Tanyeli et al., ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 6 (2014) 3462−3468.
[3] De Respinis et al., ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 5 (2013) 7621−7625.
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