Wednesday, 31 May 2017
Grand Ballroom (Hilton New Orleans Riverside)
Large porous nanostructures based electrode with high electrochemical activity are attracting a great interest in various energy conversion and storage applications. Recently, three dimensional nanostructured composites have been extensively utilized for high performance photoelectrodes of photoelectrochemical water splitting because of their large surface area and improved electron transport properties. In this work, we fabricated high porous semiconducting transition metal oxides, such as TiO2 (anatase phase) and Fe2O3 (hematite) nanostructures through soft-templating methods using sol-gel process. The cellulose nanofiber was used as template, which exhibits low thermal expansion, high surface area and good mechanical and optical properties. We investigated photoelectrochemical performances for nanocellulose- templated TiO2 and Fe2O3 nanostructures and thermal treated nanostructures. We found that thermal treatments enable rapid photogenerated electron-hole separation and transport, leading to higher photoelectrochemical efficiency, which are associated with carbonization of cellulose nanofibers. Nanocelluose-photoactive oxide composites are promising candidate for high efficient photoelectrode for solar water splitting.