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Download fileEnhanced photoelectrochemical water splitting using oxidized mass-selected Ti nanoclusters on metal oxide photoelectrodes
journal contribution
posted on 2017-01-13, 16:15 authored by Andrew McInnes, Simon R. Plant, Isabel Mecking Ornelas, Richard E. Palmer, Upul Wijayantha-Kahagala-GamageWe report an enhancement of up to 85% in the photocurrent generated from a bismuth vanadate photoanode through the prior deposition of mass-selected Ti nanoclusters onto the semiconductor surface. We studied the effect of a variety of cluster sizes, deposited at the same density and with the same energy (1.5 keV per cluster), over the surface of separate BiVO4 photoanodes in a cluster beam source. Using mass-selected clusters of a narrow size distribution, we were able to reveal that the photocurrent is strongly dependent on the cluster size (in the size regime examined), leading to an increase of up to 85% in the photocurrent for Ti2000±54 clusters. Remarkably the quantities of metal used to achieve such an enhancement are on the 2.8 × 10−7 g cm−2 level, resulting from the optimum density which is approximately 0.4 monolayers. This work highlights the importance of submonolayer surface treatments, using accurate mass-selected nanoclusters, for the modification of semiconductor surfaces in order to improve the interfacial charge transfer properties.
Funding
This research was funded by the Engineering and Physical Research Council (Grant no. EP/G037116/1) through a PhD studentship with the Doctoral Training Centre for Hydrogen, Fuel Cells and their Applications.
History
School
- Science
Department
- Chemistry
Published in
Sustainable Energy and FuelsIssue
2Citation
MCINNES, A. ... et al, 2017. Enhanced photoelectrochemical water splitting using oxidized mass-selected Ti nanoclusters on metal oxide photoelectrodes. Sustainable Energy and Fuels, 1 (2), pp. 336-344.Publisher
Royal Society of Chemistry / © The AuthorsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Acceptance date
2016-12-12Publication date
2017-01-09Notes
This is an Open Access article published by the Royal Society of Chemistry and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 3.0), http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ISSN
2398-4902Publisher version
Language
- en