Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hsu, Yu-Kuei
• Yu, Chun-Hao
• Chen, Ying-Chu
• Lin, Yan-Gu

Titel

Synthesis of novel Cu(2)O micro/nanostructural photocathode for solar water splitting

Ist Teil von

• Electrochimica acta, 2013-08, Vol.105, p.62-68

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

Access via ScienceDirect (Elsevier)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The hierarchical p-type Cu(2)O micro/nanostructural film on copper foil is successfully fabricated via a facile and cost-effective template route through transformation of lotus-like CuO/Cu(OH)(2) nanosheet/nanowire structure for photoelectrochemical (PEC) hydrogen generation. Various size of Cu(2)O micro/nanostructure transfers from CuO nanosheets and Cu(OH)(2) nanowires by means of thermally reducing the oxides from Cu(2+) to Cu(1+) at temperature of 500 C under nitrogen atmosphere. Mott-Schottky plot shows the flat band potential of the hierarchical Cu(2)O film to be -0.17 V vs. Ag/AgCl and a hole concentration of 5.7 x 10(-9) cm(-3). Direct band gap of 2.03 eV in Cu(2)O film is determined via incident photon-to-electron conversion efficiency measurement. Significantly, this Cu(2)O hierarchical photocathode exhibits remark-able photocurrent of -1.6 mA cm(-2) at a potential of -0.6 V vs. Ag/AgCl, corresponding to the solar conversion efficiency of 1.97%. These results demonstrate the Cu(2)O micro/nanostructural film have great potential in solar hydrogen applications.