A solar-light driven photocatalytic fuel cell for efficient electricity generation and organic wastewater degradation

Photocatalytic fuel cell as a potential green technology has been widely reported. In this work, MoS 2 /TiO 2 and MoS 2 /Ni foam were successfully synthesized and acted as photoanode and cathode, respectively, the as-prepared photocatalytic fuel cell. After MoS 2 is modified, the modified composite photoanode obtains higher light-harvesting, electron-hole separation efficiency and electron transport efficiency than pure TiO 2 nanorod photoanode. The result indicated that the photocurrent of the MT-3 photoanode is 1.76 times higher than that of pure TiO 2 . The enhanced performance is attributed to the formation of heterojunction between TiO 2 and MoS 2 in reducing the interface charge carrier recombination and improving the light-harvesting compared with bare TiO 2 . The highest value of open-circuit voltage (0.7 V), short-circuit current (1.04 mA •cm −2 ) and actual maximum power density (0.114 mW•cm −2 ) was obtained by the proposed MT-MN PFC. The degradation performance of the proposed PFC system was evaluated by decomposing the model organic pollutants . As the result indicates, the degradation efficiency was 69.16% when rhodamine B (20 ppm, pH=7) was used as the model organic waste.