Three-dimensional nanoporous SnO2/CdS heterojunction for high-performance photoelectrochemical water splitting

• DOI: 10.1016/j.apsusc.2021.149904
• Publication Date: 2021-05-02T00:17:15Z
• Authors: Weiguang Hu; Nguyen Duc Quang; Sutripto Majumder; Min Ji Jeong; Ji Hye Park; Young Joon Cho; Seung Bo Kim; Kyubock Lee; Dojin Kim; Hyo Sik Chang
• Keywords: 01 natural sciences; 7. Clean energy; 0104 chemical sciences

Abstract The porous structure is one of the effective structures to improve the photoelectrochemical (PEC) performance due to its high surface area to volume ratio. In this study, a porous carbon black (CB) film was prepared by a simple and inexpensive flame method, which was used as a template to grow three-dimensional (3D) nanoporous SnO2 through the atomic layer deposition (ALD) method, followed by CdS thin film coating. The photocurrent density of the optimized 3D nanoporous SnO2/CdS heterojunction (11.56 mA/cm2, 1.23 V vs. RHE) shows 9.7 times higher than that of planar SnO2/CdS film (1.20 mA/cm2, 1.23 V vs. RHE), meanwhile, the photocurrent stability was also 2.2 times improved. The maximum incident photon-to-current conversion efficiency (IPCE) and applied bias photo-to-current efficiency (ABPE) values of 35% (around 490 nm at 0 V vs. RHE) and 1.85% (at 0.90 V vs. RHE) were observed for the nanoporous SnO2/CdS. Furthermore, the surface charge separation and bulk charge transfer efficiencies have been achieved by 45.4% and 98.8% (1.23 V vs. RHE). As a whole, the results indicated that the 3D nanoporous SnO2/CdS heterojunction has been demonstrated as an efficient strategy that has been realized to show high performance in PEC water splitting.