Pulsed Laser Deposition of High Performance Metal Oxide Photoanodes for Water
Splitting
Sebastián Murcia-López*
1
, Teresa Andreu
1
, Cristian Fàbrega
2
, María Dolores
Hernández-Alonso
3
, Germán Penelas
3
, Juan Ramón Morante
1, 2
1
Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC), Sant Adrià de Besòs, Spain
2
University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
3
Repsol Technology Center, Móstoles, Spain
*e-mail:
Photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting is an important process as alternative for the
sustainable generation of hydrogen. In this sense, the evolution from classical TiO
2
and WO
3
as
photoanodes to ternary metal oxides of lower band gap as BiVO
4
has made necessary the
further development of more reliable deposition methods. Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD),
among other vapor techniques, has the significant advantage of stoichiometric
target-to-substrate transfer, besides the thickness control, reproducibility and scalability.
Additionally, combinatorial depositions allow preparing multilayered photoanodes in a single
batch. In this work, bare WO
3
,
1
BiVO
4
and BiVO
4
/WO
3
/SnO
2
heterostructures
2
all prepared by
PLD are presented, showing very promising PEC performance as photoanodes with improved
efficiencies, thus evidencing the significant reliability of the deposition technique for this
application.
Fig. 1. Photocurrent densities under 1 Sun (AM1.5G) of illumination with three photoanodes.
In the right upper part, a scheme of PLD process with a real image of a BiVO
4
electrode, and in
the lower part, a confocal construction of a WO
3
film.
References
1. Fàbrega C., Murcia-López S., Monllor-Satoca D., Prades J.D., Hernández-Alonso M.D., Penelas P., Morante
J.R., Andreu T., “Appl. Catal., B”, 189, 2016, pp. 133.
2. Murcia-López S., Fàbrega C., Monllor-Satoca D., Hernández-Alonso M.D., Penelas-Pérez G., Morata A.,
Morante J.R., Andreu T., “ACS Appl. Mater. Inter.”, 8, 2016, pp. 4076
.
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