Location: Shelby Hall 1093
Date: September 22
Time: 12:45 pm – 1:45 pm
Speaker:
Dr. Shanlin Pan, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry The University of Alabama

Title: Surface Enhanced Solar Water Splitting For Hydrogen and Plasmon Electrochemistry

The world energy consumption is projected to be 28 TW in 2050. There is an average of 1.2×105 TW of solar energy potentially available on earth, and only 1 hour of solar energy illumination can fully address the 28 TW energy challenge. Solar energy can be harvested for direct water splitting to produce hydrogen gas through photoelectrochemical (PEC) reactions, yet there is a need to develop efficient methods for solar water splitting. This “holy grail” has been sought for more than three decades and is presently being intensely investigated since Fujishima and Honda’s first experiment demonstrating direct water splitting using TiO2 photoelectrode.

Dr. Pan’s research group at The University of Alabama is working on producing hydrogen from water with sunlight at the surface of nanostructured electrode materials. Electrode materials containing plasmonic metals will be discussed to demonstrate enhanced solar fuel conversion because of their interesting optical and electrochemical enhancement characteristics. Kinds of electrode materials with several electrode fabrication configurations for addressing the challenges of plasmon enhanced water splitting systems will be presented in this seminar. These challenges include, but not limited to, how to achieve improved light harvesting and charge transport while preserving the electrochemical stability of the plasmon antenna under harsh conditions. An efficient and low cost nanostructured electrode NanoCOT will be briefly presented for splitting water with a solar cell panel. Advanced electrochemical and spectroscopic tools will be presented in this seminar for studying the interfacial charge transfer dynamics and local electrochemistry dynamics at the surface-enhanced photocatalystic electrodes for improved understanding of the structure-funciton relationship of plasmon active electrode materials.

Detailed information about the speaker can be found at: http://pangroup.as.ua.edu/ References

1.  Kaneza, Nelly; Zhang, Jingtuo; Liu, Haiying; Panikar, Archana; Shan, Zhichao; Vasiliu, Monica;Polansky, Seth; Dixon, David; Adams, Rebecca; Schmehl, Russell; Gupta, Arunava; Pan, Shanlin “Electrochemical and Spectroscopic Properties of BODIPY-Thiophene-Triphenylamine Based Dyes for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells”, J. Phys. Chem. C, 2016, 120 (17), 9068–9080.
2.  Shan, Zhichao; Archana, Panikar Sathyaseelan; Shen, Gang; Gupta, Arunava; Bakker, Martin; Pan, Shanlin, “NanoCOT: Low-Cost Nanostructured Electrode Containing Carbon, Oxygen, Titanium for Efficient Oxygen Evolution Reaction”, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2015, 137 (37),11996-12005.
3.  Archana, Panikar Sathyaseelan; Pachauri, Neha; Shan, Zhichao; Pan, Shanlin; Gupta, Arunava, “Plasmonic Enhancement of Phototoactivity by Gold Nanoparticles Embedded in Hematite Films”, J. Phys. Chem. C 2015, 119 (27), 15506–15516.
4. Hill, Caleb; Pan, Shanlin, “A Dark Field Scattering Spectroelectrochemistry Technique for Tracking the Electrodeposition of Single Ag Nanoparticles”, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 135(46),17250-17253.