Journal
JOURNAL OF MATERIALS CHEMISTRY A
Volume 6, Issue 47, Pages 24149-24156Publisher
ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/c8ta06921b
Keywords
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Funding
- Australian Research Council [DP150103026]
- NSFC [11674131]
- Australian Research Council LIEF grant [LE120100026]
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Feasible and efficient photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting demands a rational integration of solar light absorbers with active electrocatalysts. Herein, we first compare three amorphous metal-borates (M-Bi, M = Ni, Co, Mn) as low-cost electrocatalysts, among which Mn-Bi is proposed for the first time for fabrication of new PEC devices for oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Density functional theory (DFT) calculations compared the catalytic activity of the effective structures in M-Bi and found that NiO6 possesses kinetically the lowest overall OER energy barrier. Experimentally, M-Bi thin layers were self-assembled on reduced graphene oxide (rGO) linked ZnO nanorod arrays respectively, to form a highly efficient ternary PEC system (M-Bi/rGO/ZnO) using a modified photodeposition method. rGO facilitates the fast charge separation in light-absorbing ZnO NAs, while M-Bi (M = Ni, Co, Mn) can improve the kinetics of OER. In accordance with DFT results, Ni-Bi serves as the most active electrocatalyst in such a PEC device, followed by Co-Bi and Mn-Bi. Compared to ZnO, the photoelectroconversion efficiency is elevated by approximately 4 times on Ni-Bi/rGO/ZnO, with its onset potential migrated by 0.17 V in the cathodic direction under one sun illumination.
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