Efficiency of Water Splitting in a Photoelectrochemical Cell

The total irradiance is about 964.1 W/m. However, considering the effect of variations in the atmospheric conditions (such as cloudiness, dust particles and relative humidity), the spectrum is normalized to 1000 W/m. This is generally regarded as 1 sun. Photoelectrochemical water splitting is represented by the reaction  

The limiting efficiency sumit of a solar energy conversion process is [102,103]  

Apx is the chemical potential of the excited state relative to the ground state and (j) is the internal quantum efficiency which is the fraction of the excited states utilized for the generation of a useful product. The chemical potential is related Gibbs energy by 0=1,1 jV where pi is the chemical potential of the i state and Ni 

8g is solar irradiance efficiency, (]) is the quantum efficiency and Sc the chemical efficiency. Sg is defined as the fraction of the incident solar irradiance with photon energy E Eg, given by  

N(E) is the distribution of photons with respect to their energy, cj) is given by 

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