Solar Energy Conversion: A Photoelectrochemical Approach

Conversion of solar energy is an important contemporary research field with the objective of substituting fossil and nuclear power sources. The author, research director at the prestigeous A.N. Frumkin Institute of Electrochemistry, Moscow, USSR, summarizes and critically discusses photoelectrochemical solar energy conversion and its storage. After an introduction to the fundamental physics of the semiconductor/electrolyte interface, technical cells for water electrolysis for the generation of fuel-hydrogen and the electrochemical conversion of other energy rich chemicals are explained. The application of new electrochemical, e.g. microheterogeneous semiconductors, liquid-junction solar cells and electrode coatings, are discussed. The book provides an overview of current processes and potential technical applications for students, researchers, and engineers.

In the past 12-15 years an essentially new trend in electrochemistry has sprung up around the problem of solar energy conversion. Strictly speaking, this is not a purely electrochemical but an interdisciplinary field involving the fields of cataly- sis, corrosion, chemistry of disperse systems, and others. Nevertheless, electro- chemistry, to be more exact, photoelectrochemistry of semiconductors, provides a theoretical basis for new methods of converting light energy into electrical or chemical energy, which, we hope, shall find practical application in the not so dis- tant future. In the past years, this field has been discussed amply and at length in special monographs (e. g., in Ref. l]). Therefore, in this book the photoelectro- chemistry of semiconductors is presented in a concise form (exceptions are only specific problems which have been elucidated incorrectly or have not been covered completely in the literature). In this compact monograph we have aban- doned the principle of "self-seclusion": for a more deep insight into the funda- mentals of electrochemistry, photoelectrochemistry, and physics of semiconduc- tors the reader shall have to refer to the below-cited manuals, while information on the physicochemical properties of particular semiconductor electrodes can be taken, e. g., from Refs. 2, 3].