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Published October 2022 | Published
Journal Article Open

High throughput discovery of enhanced visible photoactivity in Fe–Cr vanadate solar fuels photoanodes

Abstract

Metal oxide solar absorbers are well suited for photoelectrochemical applications where requisite properties include stability in highly oxidizing environments, in addition to solar energy conversion. Metal vanadates are of particular interest due to their relatively low band gap energies compared to traditional, wide-gap photocatalysts. Concerted efforts on BiVO4-based photoanodes have revealed multiple avenues for improving the solar conversion efficiencies for photon energies above 2.5 eV but have not addressed the ultimate performance limitations from the undesirably high band gap energy. Fe and Cr vanadates have a lower band gap and thus a higher potential solar conversion efficiency, although to-date the absorbed 2–2.5 eV photons are not effectively converted to the desired anodic photocurrent. By using combinatorial synthesis and high throughput screening, we demonstrate that cation substitutions with the monoclinic MVO4 phase (M = Cr, Fe) improves the utilization of photons in this energy range. Given the portfolio of photoanode improvement techniques available, we suggest optimization of (Cr_(0.5)Fe_(0.5))VO₄-based photoanodes as a promising path for enable solar fuel technologies.

Additional Information

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 16 March 2022; Accepted 15 July 2022; Published 3 August 2022. This material is based on work performed by the Liquid Sunlight Alliance, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Fuels from Sunlight Hub under Award DE-SC0021266. Use of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, is supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515. The authors thank Apurva Mehta and Douglas Van Campen for assistance with the synchrotron experiments and Aniketa Shinde, Paul F Newhouse, and Santosh K Suram for assistance will collection of the materials characterization data. Data availability statement: The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at the following URL/DOI: https://data.caltech.edu/records/20061.

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023