Monday, 14 May 2018: 14:20
Room 612 (Washington State Convention Center)
Due to the intermittent nature of sunlight, practical solar energy utilization systems demand both efficient solar energy conversion and inexpensive large scale energy storage. We will first discuss the rational design and demonstration of efficient photoelectrochemical hydrogen generation systems using efficient semiconductors and earth-abundant catalyst materials. We have further developed novel hybrid solar-charged storage devices that integrate regenerative photoelectrochemical solar cells and redox flow batteries (RFBs) that share the same pair of redox couples. In these integrated solar flow batteries (SFBs), solar energy is absorbed by semiconductor electrodes and photoexcited caries are collected at the semiconductor-liquid electrolyte interface and used to convert the redox couples in the RFB to fully charge up the battery. When electricity is needed, the charged up redox couples will be discharged on carbon electrodes to generate the electricity as in a RFB. We have demonstrated that such SFB devices can be charged under solar light without external electric bias and deliver a high discharge capacity comparable with state-of-the-art RFBs over many cycles. After developing silicon solar cells and high performance solar cells, carefully matching them with various organic or inorganic redox couples, and optimizing several generations of SFB device designs, we have recently achieved integrated SFB device with an overall direct solar-to-output electricity efficiency (SOEE) of 14%. These high performance SFBs can serve as distributed and standalone solar energy conversion and storage systems in remote locations and enable practical off-gird electrification.