Solar energy materials, surface analysis

CZANDERNA Surface Analysis and Solar Energy Materials... 

A final class of materials is the optically transparent electrodes based on metal oxides (e.g., indium-tin oxide, ITO). These materials are very popular in the field of energy conversion, as a support for Dye-Sensitive Solar Cells, but the group of Heinemann developed at the end of the 1990s a spectroelectrochemical sensing method based on such transparent electrodes. The method is defined as the coupling of an electrochemical detection with a spectroscopic analysis." " This approach allows for multimode selectivity and is usually applied in the presence of surface modification for preconcentration of the analyte. More recently, porous and optically transparent electrodes have been prepared and applied for combined spectroscopic and electrochemical analysis" " which should lead in a near future to further developments in analytical sciences applied to the environment. 

The landscape of research in solar photocatalysis has been rapidly changing in recent years, with a flurry of activity in the development and analysis of catalysts for water oxidation and fundamental studies of photocatalysis based on semiconductor surfaces. Significant effort is currently focused on the development of more efficient catalysts based on earth-abundant materials and various strategies for the design of molecular assemblies that efficiently couple multielectron photoanodic processes to fuel production. The outstanding challenge is to identify robust materials that could catalyze the necessary multielectron transformations at energies and rates consistent with solar irradiance. 

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