Developing
facile approaches to prepare well-designed semiconductor
nanostructures is an important goal for solar water splitting. Herein,
a general solution method is reported that employs citrate to complex
diverse metal cations and affords uniform nanoporous multiple oxide
thin films with controllable porosity by spray pyrolysis. By using
CuBi2O4 as a model material, a remarkable improvement
in internal quantum efficiency and the impacts of the morphology on
photoelectrochemical (PEC) performance is demonstrated. The morphology
can be controlled by kinetically coordinating the relative rates between
the gelation and the auto-combustion of citrate in the spraying process.
Furthermore, the synthesis technique can be applied in a general fashion
to the preparation of a wide variety of well-crystallized nanoporous
oxide thin films with tunable morphologies for PEC and other heterogeneous
catalysis applications.
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