Recent advances in the BiVO4 photocatalyst for sun-driven water oxidation: Top-performing photoanodes and scale-up challenges

Abstract

Photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting, which is a type of artificial photosynthesis, is a sustainable way of converting solar energy into chemical energy. The water oxidation half-reaction has always represented the bottleneck of this process because of the thermodynamic and kinetic challenges that are involved. Several materials have been explored and studied to address the issues pertaining to solar water oxidation. Significant advances have recently been made in the use of stable and relatively cheap metal oxides, i.e., semiconducting photocatalysts. The use of BiVO4 for this purpose can be considered advantageous because this catalyst is able to absorb a substantial portion of the solar spectrum and has favourable conduction and valence band edge positions. However, BiVO4 is also associated with poor electron mobility and slow water oxidation kinetics and these are the problems that are currently being investigated in the ongoing research in this field. This review focuses on the most recent advances in the best-performing BiVO4-based photoanodes to date. It summarizes the critical parameters that contribute to the performance of these photoanodes, and highlights so far unresolved critical features related to the scale-up of a BiVO4-based PEC water-splitting device.