The scalable growth of high-performance nanostructured heterojunction photoanodes for applications in tandem photoelectrochemical-photovoltaic solar water splitting devices

Abstract

Due to their complementary absorption characteristics and band energy structure, the BiVO₄-coated WO₃ heterojunction architecture is commonly employed as a metal oxide photoanode for the water oxidation half-reaction. The energy level ordering results in a staggered heterojunction that can effectively separate photoexcited electrons into the WO₃ layer towards the current collector and photoexcited holes into the BiVO₄ layer towards the interface with the electrolyte. Chemical vapour deposition (CVD) is an upscalable technique for fabricating large-area thin films of a wide range of semiconductors with nanoscale control. The fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO)-coated transparent conductive glass substrates used herein are mass-produced by the glass industry with atmospheric pressure CVD and so the entire photoelectrode could be produced in one production process on float glass panels. This work is a detailed study of the use of atmospheric pressure CVD to fully-fabricate high-performance BiVO₄-coated WO₃ nanostructures (500–2000 nm in length with 25–100 nm thick BiVO₄ coatings) for photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting. Incident photon-to-current efficiency measurements were used to calculate optimal solar predicted photocurrents of 1.92 and 2.61 mA cm⁻² (2.3% and 3.2% solar-to-hydrogen efficiency if coupled to a hypothetical photovoltaic providing 1.23 V) for WO₃/BiVO₄ heterojunction samples under front and back-illumination, respectively. The heterojunction showed more than additive improvements over the parent materials, with bare WO₃ and BiVO₄ samples showing 0.68 and 0.27 mA cm⁻² and 0.50 and 0.87 mA cm⁻² under front and back-illumination, respectively. Simulations of the current–voltage characteristics of tandem crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules coupled to the PEC devices were consistent with the solar predicted photocurrents. These promising results for BiVO₄-coated WO₃ nanoneedles fully-deposited by atmospheric pressure CVD enables future research into photoanodes amenable to large-area scale-up.