In search of rich, renewable fossil fuel alternatives, scientists have been trying to harvest the energy of the sun through "water splitting," an artificial photosynthesis technology that uses sunlight to produce hydrogen fuel from water. But the water splitting device has not yet realized its potential because there are still no optical, electronic and chemical materials needed to work effectively. Researchers from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the US Department of Energy's Energy Innovation Center Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) have proposed a new renewable hydrogen production method that can bypass current limit. They developed an artificial photosynthesis device called a "hybrid photoelectrochemical and current (HPEV) battery", which converts sunlight and water into two energy sources-hydrogen fuel and electrical energy. A paper describing this work was published in Nature Materials on October 29.
Segev and his co-author Jeffrey W. Beeman, a JCAP researcher at the Berkeley Laboratory Chemical Science Department, and Jeffery Greenblatt, a former Berkeley laboratory and JCAP researcher and professor of experimental semiconductor physics at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, proposed a simple solution to complex problems solution.
In water splitting devices, the front surface is usually dedicated to solar fuel production, and the rear surface is used as a power outlet. To address the limitations of traditional systems, they added an additional electrical contact on the back of the silicon component, so that the HPEV device has two contacts instead of one on the back. The extra rear outlet will allow the current to be divided into two parts, so that part of the current will help the production of solar fuel, and the rest can be extracted as electricity.
After running simulations to predict whether HPEC will run as designed, they produced a prototype to test their theory. According to their calculations, the traditional solar hydrogen generator is based on a combination of silicon and bismuth vanadate, which is a widely studied material for solar water splitting. It will produce hydrogen gas with a solar energy efficiency of 6.8%. In other words, 6.8% of all incident solar energy hitting the cell surface will be stored in the form of hydrogen fuel, and the rest will be lost.
In contrast, HPEV batteries harvest the remaining electrons, which do not produce fuel. These residual electrons are used to generate electrical energy, thereby greatly improving the overall solar energy conversion efficiency. For example, according to the same calculation, the same 6.8% of solar energy can be stored as hydrogen fuel in HPEV batteries made of bismuth vanadate and silicon, and another 13.4% of solar energy can be converted into electrical energy. This brings the combined efficiency to 20.2%, which is three times that of traditional solar hydrogen cells.
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