Nanomaterials for Photoelectrochemical Hydrogen Evolution
A special issue of Crystals (ISSN 2073-4352).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 December 2025 | Viewed by 33
Special Issue Editors
Interests: electrochemistry; electrocatalysis; water splitting; hydrogen evolution reaction; oxygen evolution reaction; nanomaterials
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
High energy demands and environment pollution has forced us to think about developing an efficient technology to provide a clean alternative to fossil fuels to ensure energy sustainability. Hydrogen is best known for being the cleanest and a carbon-neutral fuel substitute for fossil fuels. The most used process to generate H2 is steam reforming, but this produces toxic gases like CO. Thus, the challenge to produce H2 from renewable sources without any carbon generation, referred to as green H2, continues. Photo-electrocatalytic/photo-electrochemical (PEC) water splitting is a promising technology, directly using solar energy to generate green H2, a clean and carbon-neutral alternative to fossil fuels. The PEC system is considered a combination of photovoltaic and electrochemical systems, where the solar energy is converted into electrical energy and then used to drive a water splitting reaction to generate H2. In a PEC device, solar energy generates electron–hole pairs at the photoelectrodes with sufficient energy to split water into H2 and O2. Nanoparticle-based photoelectrodes are embedded on the semiconductor films loaded on an electrically conductive substrate. PEC water splitting involves nanoparticle-based photo-catalysts and co-catalyst synthesis, photoelectrode preparation, device modification, or fundamental investigation with new-edge research techniques.
This Special Issue is dedicated to novel approaches towards the properties of nanomaterials for photoelectrochemical hydrogen production. Nanomaterials’ properties can be tuned to achieve the optimum band-gap required to increase the efficiency of the PEC cell. The structure–property correlation of nanomaterials plays a crucial role in that field. The ordered characteristic of nanomaterials after microscopic organization within the material causes an improved band-gap for electron–hole pair transfer. The aim is to achieve creating a highly efficient photo-electrocatalytic device that modifies the intrinsic properties of the nanomaterials used in photocathodes and photoanodes towards hydrogen generation.
Dr. Jayeeta Saha
Dr. Tushar Kanta Sahu
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- photo-electrocatalysis
- hydrogen energy
- green hydrogen
- PEC water splitting
- solar energy
- photoelectrodes
- nanoparticle-based photoelectrodes
- semiconductor films
- band-gap optimization
- nanomaterial structure-property relationship
- photocathodes
- photoanodes
- photo-electrocatalytic
- photocatalysts
- co-catalysts
- electron–hole pair transfer
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