Nanocrystalline Water Splitting Photodiodes 11 ; Device Engineering Integration & Scale-up

Solar energy is a potential contributor to our future energy needs, but has yet to achieve economic viability without the help of government subsidies. If successful, this project will progress towards commercialisation, an inherently more robust and cost-efficient option than photovoltaics. The concept is to use solar radiation to photocatalytically split water, producing hydrogen (which can be combusted directly or used to power a fuel cell) and oxygen. This is a research field where the UK is world leading at present, and this project will further reinforce this advantage. The scientific proof of concept for a device using this principle was facilitated by the Phase 1 EPSRC Grand Challenge funding; the project proposes to take forward the earlier work on the active components of the device, including researching several additional novel and scalable coating processes for producing more robust and higher performance photocatalyctic coatings, and for producing new nanopowders in larger volumes than before from which to produce these coatings.