Abstract
Using first-principles full-field electromagnetic simulations, we demonstrate that near-perfect above-band-gap solar absorption can be achieved in nanostructured, ultra-thin-film iron oxide photoanodes for photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting. In our designed core-shell nanocone structures, all regions of hematite (α-iron oxide) are away from the interface between hematite and water by a minimum distance of less than the hole diffusion length in hematite, which is assumed to be no greater than 20nm. The optical absorption in our structure corresponds to a photocurrent density of 12.5mA/cm2 if one assumes an air mass 1.5 solar spectrum and a unity absorbed photon-to-current efficiency (APCE) for all wavelengths in that spectrum. Our photon management strategy eliminates the trade-off between optical absorption and carrier collection as commonly found in conventional designs of PEC cells, and variants of the strategy are generally applicable to other material systems.
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Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the Center on Nanostructuring for Efficient Energy Conversion (CNEEC) at Stanford University, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science and Office of Basic Energy Sciences under award number DE-SC0001060. The simulations were performed on the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation grant number OCI-1053575.
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Wang, K.X., Yu, Z., Liu, V. et al. Photon Management for Near-Total Solar Absorption in Hematite Photoanodes. MRS Online Proceedings Library 1670, 8–13 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1557/opl.2014.417
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1557/opl.2014.417