Stable solar water splitting with wettable organic-layer-protected silicon photocathodes.

Protective layers are essential for Si-based photocathodes to achieve long-term stability. The conventionally used inorganic protective layers, such as TiO, need to be free of pinholes to isolate Si from corrosive solution, which demands extremely high-quality deposition techniques. On the other hand, organic hydrophobic protective layers suffer from the trade-off between current density and stability.

Zr-Al co-doped SrTiO with suppressed charge recombination for efficient photocatalytic overall water splitting.

Zr-Al co-doped SrTiO with reduced Ti concentration demonstrates more than 2 times enhancement compared with Al-doped SrTiO in photocatalytic overall water splitting. Systematic studies reveal that the co-doping of Zr can reduce the substitution of Ti by Al and effectively suppress the formation of charge carrier recombination centers (Ti).

Dynamics of partially obstructed breakup of bubbles in microfluidic Y-junctions.

For revealing the dynamics of partially obstructed breakup of bubbles in microfluidic Y-junctions, the combination of dimensionless power-law and geometric model was applied to study the effects of capillary number, bubble length, and channel angle on the bubble rupture process. In the squeezing process, the gas-liquid interface curve follows the parabolic model. For the evolution of the bubble neck during breakup, the increase of the bubble length, the channel angle, and the capillary number leads to the decrease of the focus distance α.