Abstract
Thermodynamic analysis of energy conversion from light-to-chemical, light-to-electric and electric-to-chemical is presented by the case study of water photoelectrolysis on TiO2 surface. It is demonstrated that at the current state-of-the-art energy conversion efficiency of water photoelectrolysis can be increased ∼17 times by separating the processes of solar-to-electric and electric-to-chemical energy conversion and optimizing them independently. This allows to mitigate a high overvoltage of oxygen evolution reaction with respect to thermodynamic potential as well as spectrally narrow absorbtivity of solar light by TiO2 which determine the low efficiency (∼ 1.0%) of direct light-to-chemical energy conversion. Numerical estimates are provided illustrating practical principles for optimization of the solar energy conversion and storage processes.
© 2010 Optical Society of America
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