Abstract
The grand challenges in renewable energy lie in our ability to comprehend efficient energy conversion systems, together with dealing with the problem of intermittency via scalable energy storage systems. Relatively little progress has been made on this at grid scale and two overriding challenges still need to be addressed: (i) limiting damage to the environment and (ii) the question of environmentally friendly energy conversion. The present review focuses on a novel route for producing hydrogen, the ultimate clean fuel, from the Sun, and renewable energy source. Hydrogen can be produced by light-driven photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting, but it is very inefficient; rather, we focus here on how electric fields can be applied to metal oxide/water systems in tailoring the interplay with their intrinsic electric fields, and in how this can alter and boost PEC activity, drawing both on experiment and non-equilibrium molecular simulation.
Highlights
The world needs to think about energy conversion and sustainability in a new light.Most of the conventional and non-renewable resources have only worsened pollution and ecological imbalance, transforming climate change into one of the main concerns worldwide
Given that the current review focuses on aapplication key development on research into photoimposed external fields or substrate-induced fields) to these systems—we consider current generation and water splitting—the application of electric fields to these systems—we consider imposed external fields or substrate-induced
On photocurrent generation and lifetimes of photo-generated into understanding charge-carrier hopping in external electric fields in P3HT:PCBM films holes in Fe2O3-water systems
Summary
The world needs to think about energy conversion and sustainability in a new light. Most of the conventional and non-renewable resources have only worsened pollution and ecological imbalance, transforming climate change into one of the main concerns worldwide. Increasing our understanding of the influence of electric fields on current generation in semi-conductor nanomaterial architectures will allow for developing an important new approach towards light-driven generation of electricity and hydrogen [13,29,30,31,32,33,34]—this constitutes the core focus of this review; in the present study, cutting edge methodology of molecular simulation and experimental measurements of photocatalytic hydrogen production in explicit electric fields will be discussed. Taken, with permission from [37]
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