Nowadays a continual growing demand for green energy production, smart grids, energy storage, electric vehicles etc. boosts up a need for new technology approaches. One of the solutions is conversion of the solar energy into... [ view full abstract ]
Nowadays a continual growing demand for green energy production, smart grids, energy storage, electric vehicles etc. boosts up a need for new technology approaches. One of the solutions is conversion of the solar energy into chemical bond energy.
As a first step an effort of researchers is focused to bring up a concept of a device – artificial leaf - producing a free hydrogen from water by absorbing and splitting the sunlight. Nevertheless, the concept of artificial leaf can be generalized; for example using CO2 in combination with other common matter (water, hydrogen), the artificial leaf has a potential to produce a wide scale of products: formic acid, methanol, dimethylether, methane, alcohols and other various hydrocarbons [1,2]. The products can be divided into three groups: advanced materials, fine chemicals and fuels.
We have synthesized SiNWs by CVD of silane on molybdenum substrates [3]. Unlike other works when the SiNWs have been prepared mostly in crystalline form, our SiNWs possess more complex structure (Fig. 1): thin crystalline core covered by amorphous jacket. Absorptivity is more than 98 % in the whole range of visible radiation 400-800 nm. During photoelectrochemical experiments a strong evolution of bubles was seen on SiNW deposit after irradiation of AM 1.5 G at 1 sunlight intensity. We suppose that the NWs are good candidates to substitute the standardly used tripple junction amorphous silicon (3jn-a-Si) layer system.
Fig. 1 - HRTEM image of a SiNW with clearly distinguished core-jacket structure
[1] R. Passalacqua, G. Centi, S. Perathoner, Oil & Gas Science and Technology 70 (2015) 799-815C
[2] Reece S. Y., Hamel J. A., Sung K., Jarvi T. D., Esswein A. J., Pijpers J. J. H., et al. Science 2011; 334: 645–8 I
[3] V. Drinek, M. Klementova, R. Fajgar, P. Dytrych, Materials Letters 160 (2015) 109–112
