High Surface Area Transparent Conducting Oxide Electrodes and Their Application to Energy Technologies Based On Electrochemical Processes

The ability to control the interfacial area and light trapping characteristics of structured electrodes enables new levels of performance in modern optoelectronic devices.  Textured, high surface area electrodes (HSEs) combine large interfacial areas and increased utilization of active material with a light trapping morphology – key parameters for boosting device performance.  Transparent conductive oxide (TCO) HSEs with tunable pore sizes on the nanometer to micron scale facilitate diffusion through the structure and serve as a broadly applicable platform for functionalization in many fields including electrochemical sensors, catalysis, (super)capacitors, batteries, photovoltaics and photoelectrochemistry.  In this talk we describe the development of optically transparent, electrochemically stable, physically robust HSEs with tunable roughness factors (RF) from 1 through >100.  We present a bottom-up approach to future device design and a low-cost, scalable synthetic route for production of transparent HSEs of several TCO compositions.  Lastly, we demonstrate the utility of these HSEs by incorporating thin films and particles of electrochemically active materials for enhanced performance. Examples will include adopting the HSE platform for improved supercapacitors and solar photoelectrochemical water-splitting, among others.