Preparation of Surface Dispersed WO<sub>3</sub>/BiVO<sub>4</sub> Heterojunction Arrays and Their Photoelectrochemical Performance for Water Splitting
Xiaoli Fan,
Qinying Chen,
Fei Zhu,
Tao Wang,
Bin Gao,
Li Song,
Jianping He
Affiliations
Xiaoli Fan
Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Advanced Structural Materials and Application Technology, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanjing Institute of Technology, Nanjing 211167, China
Qinying Chen
Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Advanced Structural Materials and Application Technology, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanjing Institute of Technology, Nanjing 211167, China
Fei Zhu
Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Advanced Structural Materials and Application Technology, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanjing Institute of Technology, Nanjing 211167, China
Tao Wang
College of Materials Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China
Bin Gao
College of Materials Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China
Li Song
School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing 210044, China
Jianping He
College of Materials Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China
In this work, a surface dispersed heterojunction of BiVO4-nanoparticle@WO3-nanoflake was successfully prepared by hydrothermal combined with solvothermal method. We optimized the morphology of the WO3 nanoflakes and BiVO4 nanoparticles by controlling the synthesis conditions to get the uniform BiVO4 loaded on the surface of WO3 arrays. The phase composition and morphology evolution with different reaction precursors were investigated in detail. When used as photoanodes, the WO3/BiVO4 composite exhibits superior activity with photocurrent at 3.53 mA cm−2 for photoelectrochemical (PEC) water oxidation, which is twice that of pure WO3 photoanode. The superior surface dispersion structure of the BiVO4-nanoparticle@WO3-nanoflake heterojunction ensures a large effective heterojunction area and relieves the interfacial hole accumulation at the same time, which contributes to the improved photocurrents together with the stability of the WO3/BiVO4 photoanodes.
