Facile loading of cobalt oxide on bismuth vanadate: Proved construction of p-n junction for efficient photoelectrochemical water oxidation

Huang, Jingwei; Liu, Tingting; Wang, Rongfang; Zhang, Mingyi; Wang, Lei; She, Houde; Wang, Qizhao

Facile loading of cobalt oxide on bismuth vanadate: Proved construction of p-n junction for efficient photoelectrochemical water oxidation

2020

Cobalt oxide is an excellent water oxidation cocatalyst used in photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting field. Finding a facial way to load cobalt oxide on a semiconductor anode is important to effectively realize PEC water splitting on a large scale. In this work, a simple impregnation and calcination method is developed to fabricate CoOₓ/BiVO₄ anode. The constructed CoOₓ/BiVO₄ anode provides a photocurrent of 3.1 mA cm⁻² at 1.23 V vs. RHE, about 2.8 times that of BiVO₄ anode (1.1 mA cm⁻²). Furthermore, both the charge separation and injection efficiency are improved by loading CoOₓ nanoparticles onto the BiVO₄ layer. Importantly, input voltage–output current characteristic curves are used for the first time to prove the formation of p-n junction between CoOₓ and BiVO₄, which benefits to the separation of photogenerated holes and electrons. All results indicate that the impregnation and calcination method is efficacious for facile fabrication of CoOₓ/BiVO₄ photoanode with high performance.

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