A high-activity bimetallic OER cocatalyst for efficient photoelectrochemical water splitting of BiVO4
Ruolin Hu‡a, Linxing Meng‡b, Jiaxu Zhang a, Xiang Wang a, Sijie Wu a, Zhou Wu a, Rui Zhou a, Liang Li b, Dong-Sheng Li c and Tao Wu *a（吴涛）
aCollege of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu 215123, China
bSchool of Physical Science and Technology, Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Thin Films,Center for Energy Conversion Materials & Physics (CECMP), Soochow University,Suzhou, Jiangsu 215123, China
cCollege of Materials and Chemical Engineering, Hubei Provincial Collaborative Innovation Center for New Energy Microgrid, Key Laboratory of Inorganic Nonmetallic Crystalline and Energy Conversion Materials, China Three Gorges University, Yichang, Hubei 443002, China
‡These authors contributed equally.
Nanoscale, 2020, 12, 8875--8882
BiVO4 has been widely used as a photoanode material, while the slow surface oxygen evolution reaction (OER) kinetics still severely hinders its performance. Here, an efficient bimetallic cocatalyst (named FeSnOS) was obtained by post-annealing a Fe/Sn-containing metal chalcogenide coordination compound to enhance the OER activity of BiVO4. The synergistic effect of Fe and Sn species in the amorphous FeSnOS cocatalyst efficiently lowers the interface impedance of the photoanode, reduces the electrochemical reaction overpotential, and promotes the surface OER dynamics. At the same time, a type-II heterojunction was constructed due to the process of post-annealing, which efficiently improves the bulk phase charge separation efficiency of the photoanode. The obtained optimal photoanode (named FeSnOS-BiVO4) shows a photocurrent density of 3.1 mA cm-2 at 1.23 V vs. the reversible hydrogen electrode, which is 3.4 times higher than that of the pristine BiVO4 photoanode, and its onset potential shifts negatively from 0.44 V to 0.25 V. This work presents a simple and effective method to build a bimetallic cocatalyst for improved photoelectrochemical performance, which extends the application of polymetallic metal chalcogenide complexes.
链接：https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/nr/d0nr01616k#!divAbstract