High-throughput parallel testing of ten photoelectrochemical cells for water splitting: case study on the effects of temperature in hematite photoanodes

Abstract

High-throughput testing of photoelectrochemical cells and materials under well-defined operating conditions can accelerate the discovery of new semiconducting materials, the characterization of the phenomena occurring at the semiconductor–electrolyte interface, or the understanding of the coupled multi-physics transport phenomena of a complete working cell. However, there have been few high-throughput systems capable of dealing with complete cells and applying variations in real-life operating conditions, like temperature or irradiance. Understanding the effects of the variations of these real-life operating conditions on the performance of photoelectrode materials requires reliable and reproducible measurements. In this work, we report on a setup that simultaneously tests ten individual, identical photoelectrochemical cells whilst controlling temperature. The effects of temperature from 26 to 65 °C were studied in tin-doped hematite photoanodes for water splitting – as a reference case – through cyclic voltammetry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. The increase of surface-state-mediated charge recombination with temperature mainly penalized the energy conversion efficiency due to the reduction of the photovoltage produced. For parallel measurements in the ten individual cells, standard deviations from 20 to 60 mV for the onset potentials and less than 0.2 mA cm⁻² for saturation current densities quantified the reproducibility of the results.