Hybrid photocathode based on a Ni molecular catalyst and Sb2Se3 for solar H2 production

D Alicia Garcia-Osorio; Thomas P Shalvey; Liam Banerji; Khezar Saeed; Gaia Neri; Laurie J Phillips; Oliver S Hutter; Carla Casadevall; Daniel Antón-García; Erwin Reisner; Jonathan D Major; Alexander J Cowan

doi:10.1039/d2cc04810h

Hybrid photocathode based on a Ni molecular catalyst and Sb₂Se₃ for solar H₂ production

Chem Commun (Camb). 2023 Jan 19;59(7):944-947. doi: 10.1039/d2cc04810h.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Stephenson Institute for Renewable Energy, University of Liverpool, L69 7ZF, UK. acowan@liverpool.ac.uk.
² Department of Chemistry, Aarhus University, Aarhus C 8000, Denmark.
³ Department of Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering, Northumbria University, NE1 8ST, UK.
⁴ Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, CB2 1EW, UK.

PMID: 36597867
DOI: 10.1039/d2cc04810h

Abstract

We report a H₂ evolving hybrid photocathode based on Sb₂Se₃ and a precious metal free molecular catalyst. Through the use of a high surface area TiO₂ scaffold, we successfully increased the Ni molecular catalyst loading from 7.08 ± 0.43 to 45.76 ± 0.81 nmol cm^-2, achieving photocurrents of 1.3 mA cm^-2 at 0 V vs. RHE, which is 81-fold higher than the device without the TiO₂ mesoporous layer.