Improvement of charge transfer kinetics at transparent SnO2 counterelectrodes by means of a radiolytic grafting of metallic nanoaggregates
Abstract
A radiolytic process has been used to graft metallic nano-aggregates upon SnO2 transparent counter-electrodes (tce) in order to improve their electrochemical behaviour. Among various metals iridium is shown to give the best catalytic reactivity : an Ir-grafted SnO2 working as tce in a thin layer photoelectrochemical cell exhibits a fill factor of 0.6 instead of 0.1 to 0.3 for an unmodified SnO2tce.