Development and Scale-up of Photoelectrochemical Reactors for Hydrogen Production

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The challenge of this project is to design, develop and test a scalable PEC system in order to demonstrate the viability of the concept for commercial use. A prototype PEC reactor with a connected PV to provide external bias to the reactor has been developed through collaborative efforts by the Hankin and Kafizas' research groups. As part of her MRes project, Yuqi Chen developed photoanodes based on WO3/BiVO4 heterojunctions with co-catalysts for solar generation of hydrogen. These were tested using a reactor prototype developed by the Kafizas and Hankin groups on the internal Pump Priming Fund, awarded jointly by the Grantham Institute and Energy Futures Lab. However, there were several technical issues with this existing reactor which must be overcome during this PhD project. For example, the solar to hydrogen conversion efficiency achieved during experiments was significantly lower than the target for the project and there are various potential causes for this, which will require optimisation. These include poor conductivity of the fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) substrate, especially in the larger scale samples that were tested and uniformity of the coating using chemical vapour deposition (CVD). The issues in the PEC reactor prototype were especially prevalent with scale up, so I will have to make it my first priority to try and overcome these. Nevertheless, the MRes project was able to demonstrate the promise of low cost CVD fabrication of photoanodes on FTO glass and this will continue to be investigated and optimised during my PhD. Other improvements which require further work include the need to ultimately develop a PEC reactor which does not require an external bias from a PV. It was found that there was insufficient energy produced through photogenerated electrodes from the photoanode to drive the electrolysis reaction, so more development and optimisation of the reactor configuration and materials will be required to develop a PEC reactor without an external PV.