Now researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP), a DOE Energy Innovation Hub, have come up with a new recipe for renewable fuels that could bypass the limitations in current materials. An artificial photosynthesis device called a "hybrid photoelectrochemical and voltaic (HPEV) cell" that turns sunlight and water into not just one, but two types of energy—hydrogen fuel and electricity. The paper describing this work was published on Oct. 29. 2018 in Nature Materials.
Because of Global Warming and many other environment-related reasons these days peoples are using more and more renewable alternatives to fossil fuels. Generating solar power using a Solar cell is a common source of renewable energy, But it’s efficiency is not that remarkable till this day.
Most water-splitting devices are made of a stack of light-absorbing materials. Depending on its makeup, each layer absorbs different parts or "wavelengths" of the solar spectrum, ranging from less-energetic wavelengths of infrared light to more-energetic wavelengths of visible or ultraviolet light.
The current passing through the device is limited by other materials in the stack that don't perform as well as silicon, and as a result, the system produces much less current than it could and the less current it generates, the less solar fuel it can produce.
After running a simulation to predict whether the HPEC would function as designed, Researchers made a prototype to test their theory. Surprisingly it worked. According to their calculations, a conventional solar hydrogen generator based on a combination of silicon and bismuth vanadate, a material that is widely studied for solar water splitting, would generate hydrogen at a solar to hydrogen efficiency of 6.8 %. In other words, out of all of the incident solar energy striking the surface of a cell, 6.8 % will be stored in the form of hydrogen fuel, and all the rest is lost.
The researchers plan to continue their collaboration so they can look into using the HPEV concept for other applications such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Gideon Segev said, "After a year and a half of working together on a pretty tedious process, it was great to see our experiments finally come together."
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