Superior visible-light assisted water splitting performance by Fe incorporated ZnO photoanodes

Humaira Rashid Khan, Muhammad Aamir, Bilal Akram, Asif Ali Tahir, Mohammad Azad Malik*, Muhammad Aziz Choudhary, Javeed Akhtar

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Transition metal ion incorporation has been emerged as an effective stratagem to enhance the performance of metal oxide photoanodes. In the present work, we design and fabricate the plain ZnO and (2, 5, 10 and 15%) Fe incorporated ZnO photoanodes by aerosol assisted chemical vapor deposition (AACVD) method. The 15% Fe incorporated ZnO photoanode displayed excellent photocurrent density of 4.6 mA/cm2 at 0.7 VAg/AgCl with photo conversion efficiency of 2.4%, which is 159 times higher than pure ZnO photoanode (0.028 mA/cm2). The obtained results are remarkably superior to the previous results. Furthermore, the Fe incorporated photoelectrodes have also shown good stability. The excellent photoelectrochemical performance of Fe incorporated ZnO showed red shift in band edge with relative decrease in the band gap energy compared to pure ZnO. The demonstration of this simple method for the deposition of Fe incorporated ZnO to fabricate highly efficient photoanode for the PEC water splitting can easily be applied to other similar systems.

Original languageEnglish
Article number110627
JournalMaterials Research Bulletin
Volume122
Early online date12 Oct 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2020

Keywords

  • AACVD
  • Fe incorporated ZnO
  • PEC
  • Photoanodes
  • Wurtzite

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