Because of emerging widespread applications in various fields, including water quality, energy & fuel production and environmental remediation issues, it is crucial to introduce a facile cost-effective route to enhance the activity of these PEC reactors, reduce their operational time and save their energy/power consumption.

Through the facile Coupled Faradic/Electrostatic Strategy and employing an electrostatic bias to the photoelectrode (Fig. 1), the activity of PEC reactors can be substantially boosted, and their operational time and electrical consumption can be decreased by almost half!

Figure 1. Schematic representation of the dually-biased photoelectrochemical (PEC) reactor with the manner of applying non-faradaic (electrostatic) and faradaic potential biases to the photo-reactor [Source: Journal of Power Sources 602 (2024) 234329; https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1im4f1M7w0emdr].

Although the strategy mentioned above has been originally suggested to boost the activity of a given PEC reactor for dye degradation, it is predicted it can be easily extended to other PEC systems including water splitting, solar-to-fuel conversion, artificial photoelectrochemical synthesis, etc.

Other related source: npj Clean Water (2023) 6:10 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41545-023-00230-4