Ferroelectric Enhanced Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting And A Self-powered Teng Sensor For Synchronous Detection And Electricity Generation

Water is crucial to the development of human society.Despite the fact that no life form can survive without water,water can also be used as raw materials to produce hydrogen and with flowing water like Steam or river,electricity can be generated with the help of certain generators.As for photoanode to split water,the low separation rate of photogenerated carriers is the main drawback of to increase the overall efficiency.One way to increase the separation rate of carriers is introduce the piezoelectric or ferroelectric material in photoanode.However,high quality piezoelectric material has high intrinsic resistance which would jeopardize the carrier separation.To overcome this problem,Author firstly considers putting piezoelectric material outside the photoanode,and uses Mathematica to calculate the potential distribution in the hetro-structure.The result shows that by using single layer graphene,the Piezopotential can penetrate graphene and further enhance the efficiency of photoelectrochemical catalysis.Based on the calculated result,Author fabricated corresponding device and experimental result confirms our hypothesis.With the introducing of Ferroelectrics,the light current at 1 v vs RHE has gained a boost of 50%,which is the largest number the Piezotronics photoelectrocatalysis cell can ever get.Author also fabricated a new kind of self-powered which can synchronously detect the salinity of water solution from 0 mmol/L to 1 mmol/L and generate electricity.The power generation of self-powered sensor is realized by repeatedly moving water droplets down from hydrophobia PDMS surface to firstly generate negative charges on the surface of PDMS and then change the capacitance between two electrodes to drive the screen charges(electrons)moving back and forth between two electrodes.And the ability for droplet to change the capacitance depends on its salinity.The output current and voltage of this TENG decrease with the increasing of the salinity of the water droplet,from 0.24 V and 2.44 nA to 0.092 V and 1.00 nA when the salinity of water rising from 0 mmol/L to 1 mmol/L And this sensor works in its best efficiency at 0.3 G?,when its power is 3.36 W responding a power density of 5.0 mW/m~2.