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Enhancement of efficiency of solar water splitting based on highly dense hematite single-crystal nanowires

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Abstract

Hydrogen production via solar energy is one of the promising strategies to ensure the sustainable development of humankind. The solar-driven hydrogen production required a cost-effective method and substrate to fabricate efficient photoelectrode material for practical implementation. Hematite (α-Fe2O3) is one of the abundant, cheap, and auspicious materials with photocatalytic properties which can be fabricated via simple and easy techniques. Here, we developed a cost-effective two-step heating method to fabricate high-density hematite single-crystal nanowires on Fe substrate. Firstly, we fabricated the nanowires by stress-induced atomic diffusion method on Fe substrate with different purities viz, 99.5% and 99.9% at 450 °C under water vapor atmosphere. The Fe substrate with 99.9% purity displayed higher nanowire density and photocurrent density (1.02 mA/cm2 at 1.23 V vs RHE) than that of 99.5% purity (0.73 mA/cm2 at 1.23 V vs RHE). Then, the sample with high photocurrent density was selected for the state of art second-step heating method. That is, the nanowires on 99.9% purity substrate were annealed at higher temperature (650 °C) under the mixture of argon and oxygen environment, which yielded high-density hematite single-crystal nanowires with the photocurrent density of 1.77 mA/cm2 at 1.23 V vs RHE and the stability of 1.58 mA/cm2 up to 20 min. In addition, the two-step heating hematite single-crystal nanowires showed the enhancement of solar to hydrogen conversion efficiency (STH) (2.18%) compared to the one step heating nanowires.

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All data of this research can be available from the correspondence author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are acknowledged to the JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) 17H06146 for financially supporting this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Micro-Nano Mechanical Science and Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya, 464-8603, Japan

    Md Sultan Mahmud, Sivaranjani Arumugam, Yasuhiro Kimura, Yuhki Toku & Yang Ju

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  1. Md Sultan Mahmud
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  2. Sivaranjani Arumugam
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  3. Yasuhiro Kimura
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  4. Yuhki Toku
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  5. Yang Ju
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Contributions

MdSM contributed to conceptualization, methodology, experiment, data collection, analysis, evaluation and writing of the original manuscript. SA assisted with material preparation, discussion, review, and editing. YK assisted with material characterization, discussion, suggestions, data curation, writing, review, and editing. YT contributed to critical discussion and suggestions, writing, review, editing, and validation. YJ contributed to imagination and conceptualization, methodology, experiment protocol, resources, principal research administrator, supervision, critical discussion and suggestions, data validation, writing, review, and editing.

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Correspondence to Yang Ju.

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Mahmud, M.S., Arumugam, S., Kimura, Y. et al. Enhancement of efficiency of solar water splitting based on highly dense hematite single-crystal nanowires. J Mater Sci 58, 14426–14439 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-023-08721-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-023-08721-y

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