Sharif Digital Repository

Providing solar hydrogen as a clean energy resource is one of the human challenges for future. Controlling oxygen vacancies as well as surface morphology in metal oxide semiconductors enables developing PEC H2production in some understood ways. Here, the influence of simple change in annealing atmosphere, air and pure oxygen, on photoresponse of nanocrystalline WO3has been studied completely. Results revealed that such slight change in annealing procedure increases effective surface interface and donor density by 77 and 72%, respectively. These effects and also retarding recombination of photogenerated electro-hole pair resulted in photocurrent enhancement under solar like illumination more... 

In this study, the effects of TiO2 addition on the physical and photoelectrochemical properties of ZnO thin films have been investigated. The (TiO2)x-(ZnO)1-x nanocomposite thin films were dip-coated on both glass and indium tin oxide (ITO)-coated conducting glass substrates with various values of x, specifically 0, 0.05, 0.1, 0.25 and 0.5. Optical properties of the samples were studied by UV-vis spectrophotometry in the range of 300-1100 nm. The optical spectra of the nanocomposite thin films showed high transparency in the visible region. The optical bandgap energy of the (TiO2)x-(ZnO)1-x films increased slightly with increasing values of x. The crystalline structure of the nanocomposite...