Dramatically improved energy conversion and storage efficiencies by simultaneously enhancing charge transfer and creating active sites in MnOx/TiO2 nanotube composite electrodes

Abstract

We report a general approach to achieve greatly boosted efficiency of electrochemical process in the photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting reaction and supercapacitive process by simultaneously enhancing charge transfer and creating active sites in TiO2 nanotube arrays (TNAs) electrodes. Shallow donor defects self-doping and MnOx deposition are adopted to fulfill the two desired roles, respectively. Our results clearly demonstrated that the enhanced charge transfer resulted from vacuum induced defect self-doping could dramatically improve the water splitting performance and areal capacitance of the pristine TNAs, whilst the deposited manganese oxide species, serving as electrochemically active sites, can further substantially boost their energy conversion and storage efficiencies. As a result, the MnOx/TNAs anode exhibited a photoconversion efficiency of 0.56% in neutral Na2SO4, which is the highest value of TiO2 anode in the same electrolyte under AM 1.5G illumination. Also, the composite electrode presented an areal capacitance of 12.51mFcm−2 at 5mVs−1, nearly three orders of magnitude lager than that of the pristine TNAs counter electrode. Moreover, a specific capacitance of 1117Fg−1 (at 5mVs−1) was achieved based on the mass of deposited MnO2, which also ranks in the top performance level of MnO2 based supercapacitor devices. It is hoped that the present work may shed new light on achieving enhanced performance in energy conversion and storage devices.