Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.
ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2012 Apr;4(4):2295-302. doi: 10.1021/am300395p. Epub 2012 Apr 3.
Nanostructured hematite photoanodes have been intensively studied in photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting for sustainable hydrogen production. Whereas many previous efforts have been focused on doping elements in nanostructured hematite (α-Fe(2)O(3)), we herein demonstrated an alternative approach to enhance the PEC performance by exploiting intrinsic nanostructuring properties of hematite. We found that the introduction of lattice defects effectively decreased the flatband potential and increased the charge transport mobility of nanostructured hematite, hence enhance the light harvest for more efficient hydrogen production via PEC. The nanostructured hematite photoanodes with lattice defects yielded water-splitting photocurrent density of 1.2 mA/cm(2) at 1.6 V vs reversible hydrogen electrode (RHE), which excelled defect-free ones by approximately 1.5 folds. This study thus provides a new strategy for finely tuning properties of nanostructured hematite photoanodes and enhancing the water-splitting ability of PEC.
纳米结构赤铁矿光阳极在光电化学（PEC）水分解中被广泛研究，用于可持续的氢气生产。虽然之前的许多研究都集中在掺杂纳米结构赤铁矿（α-Fe2O3）中的元素上，但我们在此展示了一种通过利用赤铁矿的固有纳米结构特性来提高 PEC 性能的替代方法。我们发现，晶格缺陷的引入有效地降低了平带电位并提高了纳米结构赤铁矿的电荷输运迁移率，从而通过 PEC 更有效地提高了光捕获以产生更多的氢气。具有晶格缺陷的纳米结构赤铁矿光阳极在 1.6 V 相对于可逆氢电极（RHE）下产生了 1.2 mA/cm2 的水分解光电流密度，比无缺陷的光阳极高出约 1.5 倍。因此，这项研究为精细调整纳米结构赤铁矿光阳极的性质和提高 PEC 的水分解能力提供了一种新策略。
