Oxide Supported Transition Metal Chalcogenides for Solar Applications

  • Qiaotian Guan

Student thesis: Master of Philosophy

Abstract

Since the advent of the industrial revolution, emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases have led to a substantial increase in global temperatures. As a result, and to avoid further warming, people have been seeking clean and renewable energy resources to reduce carbon emission. One of the options is to utilise solar energy by converting it directly to electricity using photovoltaic (PV) cells. In addition, solar energy can be used to catalyse the splitting of water to provide hydrogen as a fuel. Transition metal chalcogenides (TMC) materials exhibit great potential in photovoltaic and photocatalytic applications because of their low cost, abundance, and non-toxicity. In this project, TMC thin layers were deposited onto the surface of mesoporous/compact TiO2 thin films on ITO glass using a dip-coating method. The effect of dip-coating time length on the performance of prototype cells based on SnS/TiO2 structure was investigated. NMP and IPA were used as solvents of the TMC suspensions in the dip coating process and the different impact each solvent has to the dip coating process was investigated. MoS2 + WS2 which have been widely studied for photocatalytic water splitting were also studied following attachment to TiO2 films. Here, it was found that oxidation of the TMC occurs in ambient conditions.
Date of Award1 Aug 2020
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • The University of Manchester
SupervisorAndrew Thomas (Supervisor), Zhu Liu (Supervisor) & David Lewis (Supervisor)

Cite this

'