Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas with a rising concentration in air from year to year, so its value-added conversion to useful chemicals or fuels by exploiting sunlight is a very attractive and advantageous method. Photoelectrochemical approaches can be suitable for this purpose. However, CO2 reduction is a multi-electron process (e.g., 6 e- in the case of methanol), with considerable kinetic barriers. Thus, our main goal is to find p-type semiconductor compounds or assemble nanocomposites which can efficiently catalyze this process. An ideal candidate a) should have its conduction band position at a more negative potential than the selected CO2 reduction reaction, b) its bandgap should be narrow enough to utilize visible light, moreover c) it should withstand the effect of photocorrosion, and finally d) it has to be cost effective too. In my poster presentation I am showing the photoelectrochemical behavior of thin films, fabricated on ITO electrodes using spray coating technique, from different semiconductor nanoparticles, synthesized in our laboratories (e.g., silicon carbide, copper-niobate). The films were characterized by several techniques, such as: photovoltammetry, stationary measurements (chronoamperometry), SEM, FT-IR and Raman spectroscopy. The photoelectrochemical reactions were followed using GC and GC-MS, to assess their applicability in hydrogen evolution as well as carbon dioxide reduction.

Synthesis and characterization of p-type semiconductor inorganic nanocrystals for photoelectrochemical fuel generation

250th National Meeting (2015)

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