DEVELOPMENT OF NANOSTRUCTURED ELECTRODES FOR EFFICIENT PHOTOELECTROCHEMICAL AND ELECTROCHEMICAL WATER SPLITTING

Abstract

Developing cost-effective and durable electrocatalysts and photocatalysts for water splitting is a promising approach for clean energy production. Therefore, this project aims to develop photocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction ( HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER), as well as electrocatalysts for OER. In the photocatalyst part, the first aim is to investigate the photoelectrochemical activity of different catalysts such as Titanium dioxide nanorods (TiO2 NRs) (n-type semiconductor) and Cu2O (p-type semiconductor) heterostructures with several metal sulfides as photocatalysts for photoelectrochemical (PEC) OER and PEC HER reactions, respectively. The results demonstrate that Cu/Cu2O/MoS2 has the best performance as a photocathode for PEC hydrogen generation. On the other hand, TiO2 NRs/VS2 expressed the best performance as a photoanode couple towards PEC oxygen generation. For electrochemical OER, three binary Co-based selenides (i.e., CoMo-Se, CoNi-Se, and CoFe-Se) were developed using hybrid MOF nanostructures as precursors. Among them, MoCo-Se exhibited the best electrocatalytic activity towards OER in 1 M KOH solution.