Electrodeposition of BiVO4 with needle-like flower architecture for high performance photoelectrochemical splitting of water

Photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting is a green and sustainable approach capable of driving mass hydrogen production in the future. To realize this vision, development of a well-performing photoelectrode is highly demanded. In this comprehensive study, electrodeposition technique was applied for fabricating BiVO4 films by regulating the deposition time from 1 min until 9 min. Interestingly, the morphology, crystallinity, chemical structure, and optical properties of BiVO4 films depend strongly on the deposition time. It is found that BiVO4 layer deposited for 7 min with a cross-section thickness of around 321.1–326.5 nm showed the optimum performance, whereby the photocurrent reached up to ~0.32 mA/cm−2 at 1.23 V vs. RHE. The deposited BiVO4 represents tiny and long petals, similar to “needle” nanostructures, which is embedded closely into compact agglomerates. Such morphology enables the BiVO4 films to perform efficiently as photoanode in PEC cells. Besides, high crystallinity is detected from the sharp peaks of XRD and Raman analysis, as well as good light absorption capability that are the main contributors to the enhancement of PEC performance. In addition to the facile fabrication offered by electrodeposition method, the non-toxic attributes and the impressive PEC performance of the optimum BiVO4 layer could serve as an interesting option for other applications such as gas sensors, solar cells, degradation of pollutants and photocatalytic water splitting.