P-n Based Photoelectrochemical Device for Water Splitting Application Alpha-Hematite (α-Fe₂O₃)-Titanium Dioxide (tio₂) as N-Electrode & Polyhexylthiophene (rrphth) - Nanodiamond (ND) as P-Electrode

Recently, photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting using semiconductor photoanode has received great attention due production of hydrogen through clean energy. The alpha hematite (α Fe₂O₃) is one of the candidate amongst photoanodic materials, which is chemically stable, abundant in nature with a band gap of 2.0-2. 2eV allowing to be harvesting in the visible light. However, it has also drawn back due to high recombination rate of electron-hole pair revealing the low concentration of charges and lower device performance. In common with α-Fe₂O₃, the titanium dioxide (TiO₂) has been known as one of the most explored photoanode electrode material due to its physical and chemical stability in aqueous and non-toxicity. However, TiO₂ has large bandgap (3.0-3.2 eV) that results in absorbing UV light and very small part of visible region. Incorporation of TiO₂ in α-Fe₂O₃ could achieve better efficiencies as photoanode materials by enhancing the electric conductivity, limited hole diffusion length, and both materials can absorb light in both UV and visible spectrum range. However, the photoanodic properties of α-Fe₂O₃ with different concentrations of TiO₂ are mostly unknown. Under this work, α-Fe₂O₃-TiO₂ nanomaterial was synthesized using a hydrothermal method. The α-Fe₂O₃-TiO₂ nanomaterials containing different weight percentage (2.5, 5, 16, 25, and 50) of TiO₂ to α-Fe₂O₃ were characterized using SEM, XRD, UV-Vis, FTIR and Raman techniques, respectively. The electrochemical properties of α-Fe₂O₃-TiO₂ nanomaterials were investigated by cyclic voltammetry and chronoamperometry techniques, respectively.