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With the research of renewable and environmentally friendly energy, PEC water splitting, as one of the most promising strategies to produce hydrogen in a green way, has received wide attention. The joint research team of Prof. Wu Limin with the College of Energy Materials of IMU and Chemistry and Prof. Wang Lei with the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of IMU, with the previous synthesis of NiB layer in situ, has enhanced to a large extent the PEC performance of the neutral electrolyte of BiVO4 photoelectrodes of（Sci. Adv. 2023, 9, eade4589）. With single-atom-doped photoelectrodes to regulate carrier transport（Nat. Commun. 2023, 14, 2640）, the team designed and developed a kind of Ru-P-pair-site-loaded photoanode of a-Fe2O3 for such problems of a-Fe2O3 as low electron mobility, serious electron-hole recombination, short hole diffusion length(2 to 4 nm) and slow water oxidation.
Guided by the single-atom engineering, the research team disperses Ru and P diatomic sites onto hematite (DASs Ru-P:Fe2O3) to construct an efficient photoelectrode of ferric oxide. The resultant photoanode shows superior photocurrent densities of 4.55 and 6.5 mA cm−2 at 1.23 and 1.50 VRHE, a low-onset potential of 0.58 VRHE, and a high applied bias photon-to-current conversion efficiency of 1.00% under one sun illumination. The results of dynamic experiments reveal that a low Ru is loaded, as single atom, onto a-Fe2O3 and forms Ru-P bonds in the material, which efficiently prevents the recombination of photogenerated carriers and increases the carrier separation and fast charge transportation. The DFT calculations further prove the superiority of the Ru-P bonds compared to the Ru-O bonds, which allows more long-lived carriers to participate in the water oxidation reaction. This work offers an effective strategy for enhancing charge carrier transportation dynamics by constructing pair sites into semiconductors, which may be extended to other photoelectrodes for solar water splitting. The research results have been published in PNAS (PNAS, 2023, 120, e2300493120).
Gao Ruiting, PhD student of the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of IMU who was admitted in 2020, is the first author. Prof. Wu Limin and Prof. Wang Lei are co-corresponding authors. The research has been supported by the Special Program for Nanometer Technology Research, a key research and development program of the Ministry of Science and Technologies of P.R.C, the Innovative Research Group of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Program of Grassland Talents of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the Program for Outstanding Young Scientists of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
URL of the article: Rui-Ting Gao , Lijia Li, Yanbo L, Yang Yang, Jinlu He, Xianhu Liu , Xueyuan Zhang , Lei Wan, and Limin Wu, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2300493120.
