Achievement

Meghan Schulz worked on developing anodes for solar hydrogen electrophotchemistry. Ron Murray worked on polymer solar cells with ZnO nanowires. The work on solar hydrogen involved materials chemistry to develop robust, corrosion proof, anodes to be used in Electrochemical photocells. TiO2 was the base material. Since TiO2 has a band gap of 3.2 eV, the material was modified by N and C doping to effectively reduce the bandgap. N works very well whereas C forms midgap states that are not useful. The issue with the polymer solar cell has to do with the limited diffusion length of the carriers that require a modified geometry of the active material. ZnO naowires are used to study the proximity effects.