Browsing by Author "Shen, Yen-Ping"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Breakthrough to Non-Vacuum Deposition of Single-Crystal, Ultra-Thin, Homogeneous Nanoparticle Layers: A Better Alternative to Chemical Bath Deposition and Atomic Layer Deposition
(2017-04-01)
Liao, Yu-Kuang
;
Liu, Yung-Tsung
;
Hsieh, Dan-Hua
;
Shen, Tien-Lin
;
Hsieh, Ming-Yang
Most thin-film techniques require a multiple vacuum process, and cannot produce high-coverage continuous thin filmswith the thickness of a fewnanometers on rough surfaces. We present a new "paradigm shift" non-vacuum process to deposit high-quality, ultra-thin, single-crystal layers of coalesced sulfide nanoparticles (NPs) with controllable thickness down to a few nanometers, based on thermal decomposition. This provides high-coverage, homogeneous thickness, and large-area deposition over a rough surface, with little material loss or liquid chemical waste, and deposition rates of 10 nm/min. This technique can potentially replace conventional thin-film deposition methods, such as atomic layer deposition (ALD) and chemical bath deposition (CBD) as used by the Cu(In, Ga) Se2 (CIGS) thin-film solar cell industry for decades. We demonstrate 32% improvement of CIGS thin-film solar cell efficiency in comparison to reference devices prepared by conventional CBD deposition method by depositing the ZnS NPs buffer layer using the new process. The new ZnS NPs layer allows reduction of an intrinsic ZnO layer, which can lead to severe shunt leakage in case of a CBD buffer layer. This leads to a 65% relative efficiency increase.
Reversible adapting layer produces robust single-crystal electrocatalyst for oxygen evolution
(2015-08-01)
Tung, Ching-Wei
;
Hsu, Ying-Ya
;
Shen, Yen-Ping
;
Zheng, Yixin
;
Chan, Ting-Shan
Electrochemically converting water into oxygen/hydrogen gas is ideal for high-density renewable energy storage in which robust electrocatalysts for efficient oxygen evolution play crucial roles. To date, however, electrocatalysts with long-term stability have remained elusive. Here we report that single-crystal Co3O4 nanocube underlay with a thin CoO layer results in a high-performance and high-stability electrocatalyst in oxygen evolution reaction. An in situ X-ray diffraction method is developed to observe a strong correlation between the initialization of the oxygen evolution and the formation of active metal oxyhydroxide phase. The lattice of skin layer adapts to the structure of the active phase, which enables a reversible facile structural change that facilitates the chemical reactions without breaking the scaffold of the electrocatalysts. The single-crystal nanocube electrode exhibits stable, continuous oxygen evolution for 41,000 h. This robust stability is attributed to the complementary nature of defect-free single-crystal electrocatalyst and the reversible adapting layer.