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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik

O 60: Dielectric and Molecular/Water Interfaces

O 60.10: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 18. März 2015, 17:15–17:30, MA 043

Nanostructured metal arrays on Si wafers for solar fuel production — •Simon Filser¹, Robin Nagel², Katrin Bickel¹, Qi Li¹, Konrad Schönleber¹, Guiseppe Scarpa², Paolo Lugli², and Katharina Krischer¹ — ¹TU München, Physik-Department E19a, James-Franck-Str., 85748 Garching, Germany — ²TU München, Lehrstuhl für Nanoelektronik, Arcisstrasse 21,80333 München, Germany

One approach for the storage of solar energy is the photoelectrochemical conversion of the climate-wrecking CO₂ into hydrocarbons. It is well-known that bulk metal electrodes, e.g. gold or copper, reduce CO₂ at high overpotentials [1]. The product distributions containing e.g. CO, ethylene and methane sensitively depend on the electrode material and the reaction conditions. Our aim is to integrate such metal catalysts into an electrochemical solar cell to directly transform solar energy into chemical fuels. Conduction band electrons generated by light absorption in the semiconductor are transferred into the metal catalyst where they are used to reduce CO₂ to different products in several reaction steps. We realize such a system by structuring a silicon substrate with chessboard arrays of gold structures which can be electrochemically plated by copper which is the only material known to reduce CO₂ to methane and ethylene. Silicon is chosen as a substrate because its band gap is well-suited to the solar spectrum. In our experiments, we examine the CO₂ reduction efficiency and the product distribution of the CO₂ reduction on goldstructures.

[1] Y. Hori, K. Kikuchi, S. Suzuki, Chem. letters, 1985, 1695-1698.