Solar Fuels

11Impactful Role of Earth-Abundant Cocatalysts in Photocatalytic Water Splitting

Yubin Chen^1*, Xu GuO^2†, Zhichao Ge¹, Ya Liu¹ and Maochang Liu¹

¹International Research Center for Renewable Energy, State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Shaanxi, China

²Shaanxi Key Laboratory for Advanced Energy Devices, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shaanxi Normal University, Shaanxi, China

Abstract

Photocatalytic water splitting represents an attractive strategy for storing intermittent solar energy in the form of chemical bonds. Considerable efforts have been made to design efficient and stable semiconductor photocatalysts. However, the efficiencies of most developed photocatalysts are still unsatisfactory due to the severe charge recombination and sluggish surface reaction kinetics. Loading suitable cocatalysts can efficiently capture the photogenerated carriers to reduce charge recombination and provide surface reactive sites to accelerate the chemical reaction. Typically, developing earth-abundant cocatalysts to replace noble-metal-based ones is of great significance for the practical application. To understand the impactful role of cocatalysts in photocatalytic water splitting, this chapter first introduces the basic working principle of cocatalysts and then summarizes extensively studied earth-abundant cocatalysts. The effects of intrinsic characters of cocatalysts, such as morphology, crystallization, and composition are ...