Synchronized carrier extraction and injection through boron nitride nanoplatelets in hierarchical BiVO4/CoCr-layered double hydroxides for efficient water oxidation
By Mohanta, Manoj Kumar; Sahu, Tushar Kanta; Bhowmick, Sourav; Qureshi, Mohammad
Published in Electrochimica Acta
2022
Abstract
Interfacial insertion of hole extractor between semiconductor photoanode and surface oxygen evolution catalyst (OECs) is a promising operative approach for amplified photoelectrochemical (PEC) water oxidation performance. Herein, modifications of bare monoclinic BiVO4 photoanode with two dimensional boron nitride nanoplatelets (BNNPs) as hole extractor and CoCr-layered double hydroxides (CoCr-LDH) as kinetics accelerator results to achieve a maximum photocurrent density of 3.8 mA/cm2 at 1.23 V vs RHE along with a cathodic shift of ∼360 mV onset photocurrent, which indicates the 3.2 fold enhancement in photo-current density in comparison to bare BiVO4. Semiconductor/hole extractor/OECs composite photoanode, i.e., BiVO4/BNNPs/CoCr-LDH offers speedy charge separation with suppressed charge recombination to accelerate the PEC water oxidation kinetics. The presented work is promising as it fill-in the gap between the photoanode and OECs for boosting the PEC water oxidation efficiency of metal-oxide based photoanode.