Abstract
One-dimensional zinc oxide nanorods array exhibit excellent electron mobility and thus hold great potential as photoanode for photoelelctrochemical water splitting. However, the poor absorption of visible light and the prominent surface recombination hider the performance improvement. In this work, Au nanoparticles and aluminium oxide were deposited onto the surface of ZnO nanorods to improve the PEC performance. The localized surface plasmon resonance of Au NPs could expand the absorption spectrum to visible region. Simultaneously, the surface of passivation with Au NPs and Al2O3 largely suppressed the photogenerated electron-hole recombination. As a result, the optimal solar-to-hydrogen efficiency of ZnO/Au/Al2O3 with 5 cycles was 6.7 times that of pristine ZnO, ascribed to the synergistic effect of SPR and surface passivation. This research reveals that the synergistic effect could be used as an important method to design efficient photoanodes for photoelectrochemical devices.
Highlights
One-dimensional zinc oxide nanorods array exhibit excellent electron mobility and hold great potential as photoanode for photoelelctrochemical water splitting
The results demonstrated the zinc oxide (ZnO)/Au/Al2O3 with 5 cycles (ZAA-5) delivered the best photocurrent density response compared to the ZnO/Au or pristine ZnO photoanode, respectively
Au NPs and Al2O3 overlayer were synergistically integrated into ZnO based photoanode for PEC water splitting
Summary
Yichong Liu[1], Xiaoqin Yan[1], Zhuo Kang[1], Yong Li1, Yanwei Shen[1], Yihui Sun[1], Li Wang2 & Yue Zhang[1,3]. Among extensive efforts to hydrogen generation, photoelectrochemical(PEC) water splitting attracts considerable attention as it integrats in the same device both solar energy collection and water electrolysis Metal oxides such as titanium dioxide(TiO2)[1,2], zinc oxide(ZnO)[3,4], hematite(Fe2O3)[5,6] and cuprous oxide(Cu2O)[7,8] have shown great potential as photoelectrodes in photoelectrochemical cells for hydrogen evolution. The results demonstrated the ZnO/Au/Al2O3 with 5 cycles (ZAA-5) delivered the best photocurrent density response compared to the ZnO/Au or pristine ZnO photoanode, respectively Such enhancement was ascribed to the synergistic effect of SPR induced by Au NPs and surface passivation resulted from the Au NPs and Al2O3 overlayer
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