Abstracts Book - IMRC 2018

• SC3-P003
SOLAR WATER SPLITTING USING NANOSCALE TUNGSTEN OXIDE
Keea Healey 1 , Dillon Kopecky 2 , Ram Neupane 1 , Maggie Paulose 1 , Oomman Varghese 1
1 University of Houston, Physics, United States. 2 University of Houston, Chemistry, United
States.
It has become increasingly evident that fossil fuel burning is primarily
responsible for human impact on global climate change and hence, accelerating
the development of alternate technologies is a need of the time. Hydrogen
generation using water and sunlight is such a technology that, when fully
developed, can alleviate the energy demands of the modern society. Among
various strategies that can be used for generating hydrogen, solar photocatalytic
process enables direct conversion of solar energy to water derived hydrogen
under normal atmospheric conditions. Tungsten oxide is a promising material
for this application due to its relatively broad spectrum light absorption,
abundance and low cost. Nanostructured tungsten oxide has been proven to
possess superior performance over other forms due to its high surface area and
desirable charge transport characteristics. For photocatalytic (or
photoelectrochemical) hydrogen production via solar water splitting to be
practical, cost effective and scalable techniques should be developed for
material fabrication. Here we report development of unique nano-architectures
of tungsten oxide using freeze drying and solvothermal techniques. While
solvothermal is commonly used for nanoscale tungsten oxide, freeze drying,
which is a scalable and low cost technique, has not been effectively explored for
this purpose. We will compare the morphology, structure, composition and
optical properties of the materials developed using these two routes. The
photocatalytic nature of the materials will be discussed in detail in the context
of water splitting using simulated sunlight.
Keywords: Nanostructures, Tungsten, Hydrogen Production
Presenting authors email: khealey@central.uh.edu