Efficient Water-Splitting Device Based on a Bismuth Vanadate Photoanode and Thin-Film Silicon Solar Cells

Efficient water-splitting device based on a bismuth vanadate photoanode and thin-film silicon solar cells.

A hybrid photovoltaic/photoelectrochemical (PV/PEC) water-splitting device with a benchmark solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency of 5.2% under simulated air mass (AM) 1.5 illumination is reported. This cell consists of a gradient-doped tungsten-bismuth vanadate (W:BiVO4 ) photoanode and a thin-film silicon solar cell. The improvement with respect to an earlier cell that also used gradient-do...

Reactive Sputtering of Bismuth Vanadate Photoanodes for Solar Water Splitting

Bismuth vanadate (BiVO4) has attracted increasing attention as a photoanode for photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting. It has a band gap in the visible light range (2.4−2.5 eV) and a valence band position suitable for driving water oxidation under illumination. While a number of methods have been used to make BiVO4 photoanodes, scalable thin film deposition has remained relatively underexp...

Thin-film Silicon Solar Cells

The simplest semiconductor junction that is used in solar cells for separating photogenerated charge carriers is the p-n junction, an interface between the p-type region and ntype region of one semiconductor. Therefore, the basic semiconductor property of a material, the possibility to vary its conductivity by doping, has to be demonstrated first before the material can be considered as a suita...

Thin-film crystalline silicon solar cells

A photoelectric conversion efficiency of over 10% has been achieved in thin-film polycrystalline silicon solar cells which consists of a 2 μm thick layer of polycrystalline silicon with a very small grain size (microcrystalline silicon) formed by low-temperature plasma CVD. This has shown that if the recombination velocity at grain boundaries can be made very small, then it is not necessarily i...

Crystalline Silicon Thin Film Solar Cells