Nature of Nitrogen Incorporation in BiVO 4 Photoanodes through Chemical and Physical Methods
Type
ArticleAuthors
Irani, RowshanakAhmet, Ibbi Y.
Jang, Ji-Wook
Berglund, Sean P.
Plate, Paul
Höhn, Christian
Böttger, Roman
Schmitt, Sebastian W.
Dubourdieu, Catherine
Lardhi, Sheikha F.

Cavallo, Luigi

Harb, Moussab

Bogdanoff, Peter
van de Krol, Roel
Abdi, Fatwa F.

KAUST Department
Chemical Science ProgramKAUST Catalysis Center (KCC)
Physical Science and Engineering (PSE) Division
Date
2019-10Online Publication Date
2019-10Print Publication Date
2020-01Submitted Date
2019-06-27Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/661434
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In recent years, BiVO4 has been optimized as a photoanode material to produce photocurrent densities close to its theoretical maximum under AM1.5 solar illumination. Its performance is, therefore, limited by its 2.4 eV bandgap. Herein, nitrogen is incorporated into BiVO4 to shift the valence band position to higher energies and thereby decreases the bandgap. Two different approaches are investigated: modification of the precursors for the spray pyrolysis recipe and post-deposition nitrogen ion implantation. Both methods result in a slight red shift of the BiVO4 bandgap and optical absorption onset. Although previous reports on N-modified BiVO4 assumed individual nitrogen atoms to substitute for oxygen, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy on the samples reveals the presence of molecular nitrogen (i.e., N2). Density functional theory calculations confirm the thermodynamic stability of the incorporation and reveal that N2 coordinates to two vanadium atoms in a bridging configuration. Unfortunately, nitrogen incorporation also results in the formation of a localized state of ≈0.1 eV below the conduction band minimum of BiVO4, which suppresses the photoactivity at longer wavelengths. These findings provide important new insights on the nature of nitrogen incorporation into BiVO4 and illustrate the need to find alternative lower-bandgap absorber materials for photoelectrochemical energy conversion applications.Citation
Irani, R., Ahmet, I. Y., Jang, J.-W., Berglund, S. P., Plate, P., Höhn, C., … Abdi, F. F. (2019). Nature of Nitrogen Incorporation in BiVO 4 Photoanodes through Chemical and Physical Methods. Solar RRL, 4(1), 1900290. doi:10.1002/solr.201900290Sponsors
This research was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), project “MANGAN” (03SF0505), and Europe's Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH-JU), project “PECDEMO” (Grant Agreement no. 621252). Parts of this research were conducted at IBC at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf e.V., a member of the Helmholtz Association. For computational resources, this research used the Shaheen II supercomputer of KAUST Supercomputing Laboratory in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.Publisher
WileyJournal
Solar RRLAdditional Links
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/solr.201900290https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/solr.201900290
ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1002/solr.201900290
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