Abstract
To date, solar energy generation devices have been widely studied to meet a clean and sustainable energy source. Among them, water splitting photoelectrochemical cell is regarded as a promising energy generation way for splitting water molecules and generating hydrogen by sunlight. While many nanostructured metal oxides are considered as a candidate, most of them have an improper bandgap structure lowering energy transition efficiency. Herein, we introduce a novel wet-based, successive photoreduction process that can improve charge transfer efficiency by surface plasmon effect for a solar-driven water splitting device. The proposed process enables to fabricate ZnO/CuO/Ag or ZnO/CuO/Au hierarchical nanostructure, having an enhanced electrical, optical, photoelectrochemical property. The fabricated hierarchical nanostructures are demonstrated as a photocathode in the photoelectrochemical cell and characterized by using various analytic tools.
Highlights
Increasing demands for clean and sustainable energy sources have promoted the development of solar-based energy generation devices [1,2]
The dopant doping or metal nanoparticle/layer deposition is typically conducted by flame spray [15], thermal treatment [16], sputtering [17], chemical vapor deposition (CVD) [18], plasma layer deposition (PLD) [19], atomic layer deposition (ALD) [20], and other vacuum-based techniques
The ZnO/CuO/M hierarchical nanostructure is fabricated by a successive photoreduction process
Summary
Increasing demands for clean and sustainable energy sources have promoted the development of solar-based energy generation devices [1,2]. As a solar energy source, the sunlight-driven water splitting photoelectrochemical (PEC) cell has been intensively explored due to an intuitive working principle and various nanostructured metal oxide candidates such as CuO [3,4], Cu2O [5], Fe2O3 [6,7], TiO2 [8,9], WO3 [10], and ZnO [11,12]. We represent a novel fabrication method for the hierarchical nanostructure by using successive photoreduction process. In order to tune energy bandgap level of ZnO, photoreduction process is conducted to make ZnO/CuO hetero junction nanostructure.
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