4.8 Article

Structural and Compositional Investigations on the Stability of Cuprous Oxide Nanowire Photocathodes for Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting

Journal

ACS APPLIED MATERIALS & INTERFACES
Volume 13, Issue 46, Pages 55080-55091

Publisher

AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.1c16590

Keywords

cuprous oxide; nanowire structure; photocathode; photoelectrochemical water splitting; stability

Funding

  1. Basic Science Research Program - Korea Institute of Ceramic Engineering and Technology, the Republic of Korea [KPB21004]
  2. Korea Institute of Ceramic Engineering Technology [KPP20004-1]
  3. Program of Future Hydrogen Original Technology Development through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) - Korean government (Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT)) [NRF-2021M3I3A1084649]
  4. National Key Research and Development Program of China [2018YFB1502003, 2019YFE0123400]
  5. National Natural Science Foundation of China [52072187]
  6. Swiss National Science Foundation [514259]

Ask authors/readers for more resources

Cuprous oxide is a promising photocathode material for PEC water splitting, but suffers from poor stability in strong acidic or alkaline conditions. Improvements in performance have been made by introducing nanostructures and catalysts, but further research is needed to establish suitable protection strategies for durable PEC water splitting.
Cuprous oxide (Cu2O) is a promising photocathode material for photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting. Recently, the PEC performances of Cu2O-based devices have been considerably improved by introducing nanostructures, semiconductor overlayers, and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) catalysts. However, Cu2O devices still suffer from poor stability in aqueous solution, especially in strong acidic or alkaline conditions, despite the use of an intrinsically stable oxide overlayer as a protection layer. Thus, it is essential to fully understand the stability of the entire Cu2O photocathodes in these conditions for establishing suitable protection strategies to achieve durable PEC water splitting. In this work, the stability of bare and protected Cu2O nanowire (NW) photocathodes was evaluated in detail using microscopy techniques and compositional analyses. The insights gained in this work will guide the design and synthesis of durable photoelectrodes for PEC water splitting.

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