Issue 39, 2018

High performance duckweed-derived carbon support to anchor NiFe electrocatalysts for efficient solar energy driven water splitting

Abstract

Solar-energy-driven overall water splitting using sustainable energy resources is extremely desirable for high purity hydrogen fuel production, and one of the ways is to couple cost-effective solar cells in series with earth-abundant electrocatalysts for oxygen and hydrogen evolution reactions, OER and HER, respectively. Developing highly efficient and earth-abundant electrocatalysts however remains one of the grand challenges. Herein, we developed biomass (duckweed, DW) derived N,S-doped mesoporous carbon matrix supported NiFe-alloy nanoparticles (NPs) as efficient electrocatalysts for overall water splitting. While the annealed catalyst required 267 mV overpotential at 10 mA cm−2 for the OER, the best HER performance was demonstrated by the unannealed electrocatalyst requiring 106 mV at −10 mA cm−2 in 1 M KOH. For overall water splitting, this couple required only 1.61 V cell voltage to deliver 10 mA cm−2, with continuous release of O2 and H2 gas bubbles for more than 200 h. On integrating with perovskite solar cells, the homologous DW electrolyzer exhibited unassisted solar-energy-driven overall water splitting with a solar-to-hydrogen (STH) conversion efficiency of 9.7%.

Graphical abstract: High performance duckweed-derived carbon support to anchor NiFe electrocatalysts for efficient solar energy driven water splitting

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
18 Jul 2018
Accepted
06 Sep 2018
First published
06 Sep 2018

J. Mater. Chem. A, 2018,6, 18948-18959

High performance duckweed-derived carbon support to anchor NiFe electrocatalysts for efficient solar energy driven water splitting

A. Kumar, D. K. Chaudhary, S. Parvin and S. Bhattacharyya, J. Mater. Chem. A, 2018, 6, 18948 DOI: 10.1039/C8TA06946H

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements