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Hao Xiu, Fan Fan, Pan An, Mengshen Zhang, Yuting Wang, Yongpeng Cui, Yajun Wang, Guiyuan Jiang, Chunming Xu. Bioinspired Hierarchical Nanostructured CuBi2O4/CuO Heterojunction Photocathode for Enhanced Performance in Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting. Green Energy&Environment. doi: 10.1016/j.gee.2025.12.016
Citation: Hao Xiu, Fan Fan, Pan An, Mengshen Zhang, Yuting Wang, Yongpeng Cui, Yajun Wang, Guiyuan Jiang, Chunming Xu. Bioinspired Hierarchical Nanostructured CuBi2O4/CuO Heterojunction Photocathode for Enhanced Performance in Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting. Green Energy&Environment. doi: 10.1016/j.gee.2025.12.016
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Bioinspired Hierarchical Nanostructured CuBi2O4/CuO Heterojunction Photocathode for Enhanced Performance in Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting

doi: 10.1016/j.gee.2025.12.016

  • State Key Laboratory of Heavy Oil Processing, China University of Petroleum, Beijing, Beijing 102249, People’s Republic of China

Funds:

This work is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2021YFB4000405), National Natural Science Foundation of China (52270115, 52236003, 22109178), Science Foundation of China University of Petroleum Beijing (No. 2462023YJRC032, 2462023YJRC022).

  • Received date 06 August 2025, Accepted date 30 December 2025, RevRecd date 17 December 2025, Available online 12 January 2026
    Abstract
  • The development of high-performance photocathode materials is crucial for solar hydrogen production, but their efficiency is often limited by poor charge separation, inefficient interfacial transfer, and sluggish surface reactions. In this work, a coral-like hierarchical nanostructured CuBi2O4/CuO heterojunction photocathode was designed to simultaneously overcome these limitations by synergistic adjusting the morphology and bandgap alignment. The optimized photocathode, featuring finer nanoscale microtentacles, substantially enhances the number of reactive sites, resulting in a significant enhanced interfacial electric field, which is 1.4 times greater than that of pure CuBi2O4. The CuBi2O4/CuO heterojunction photocathode generates a photocurrent density of 2.88 mA·cm-2 at 0.6 V vs. RHE, which is 4.43 times higher than that of a pure CuBi2O4 photocathode, and the incident photo-current efficiency reaches 18% at 400 nm. The charge transfer mechanism was elucidated using synchronous illumination X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (SI-XPS), in-situ Kelvin probe force microscopy (SI-KPFM) and density functional theory (DFT) calculations, which directly observed the transfer of photogenerated electrons from CuBi2O4 to CuO and confirmed the enhancement of the interfacial electric field intensity induced by the S-scheme heterojunction. This work integrates bionic strategies into PEC applications, offering a valuable reference for the structural design of photoelectrodes and potentially advancing the efficiency of photoelectrochemical systems.

     

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