In this Article, we report a strategy to perform in situ incorporation of oxygen evolution catalyst, Co 3 O 4, during hydrothermal growth of Fe 2 O 3 nanorod arrays. It was found that the highest photocurrent increase and onset potential shift was observed with 5% Co 2+ . The photocurrent density increases from 0.72 for the pristine Fe 2 O 3 nanorod to 1.20 mA/cm 2 at 1.23 V versus RHE (i.e., 67% improvement) with 5% Co 2+ added. Concomitant with this improvement was a shift in the onset potential by ∼40 mV and improvements in incident-photon-to-current efficiencies and oxygen evolution. Hematite photoanodes with in situ deposition of Co 3 O 4 nanoparticles showed better performance than those prepared by ex situ procedures because of high surface roughness, larger Co 3 O 4 /hematite interfacial area, and smaller Co 3 O 4 particle size.
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Xi et al. (2012) studied this question.