Optimization of Photocatalytic Fuel Cell (PFC) and Synthesis of Metal Complexes as Potential Photocatalysts in PFC for Synthetic Methyl Red Dye Degradation

Jia Chee, Liu (2025) Optimization of Photocatalytic Fuel Cell (PFC) and Synthesis of Metal Complexes as Potential Photocatalysts in PFC for Synthetic Methyl Red Dye Degradation. Masters thesis, UNIMAS.

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Abstract

Photocatalytic fuel cell (PFC) is the combination of photocatalysis and fuel cell that can be used to treat wastewater and convert chemical energy to electrical energy simultaneously. Dual-chamber photocatalytic fuel cell (DCPFC) has been reported to have better performance than single-chamber photocatalytic fuel cell (SCPFC) because of the ability to prevent the electron-hole recombination in DCPFC. But there was not many side-by-side studies found in the literature to compare the performance in between SCPFC and DCPFC. This study presents a comprehensive comparison at different parameters between typical SCPFC and DCPFC for the synthetic methyl red dye degradation and power generation under different conditions. The performance of PFC influenced by the electron transfer driven by potential difference between two electrodes. SCPFC system after suffers from the fast recombination of electron-hole pairs. Besides that, the wide band gap of photocatalyst used in PFC has limited the utilization of sunlight hence has unsatisfied performance. The transition metal complexes with smaller band gap are believed to be able to improve the photocatalytic performance when applied as a photocatalyst in PFC. In the present study, a DCPFC setup was setup by separating the photoanode and cathode into two different chambers to prevent the rapid electron-hole recombination. Both types of PFC used ZnO/Zn as photoanode to treat the 10 ppm synthetic methyl red dye solution at pH 4. The DCPFC achieved a highest power generation (132.83 mW/cm2) and 100% dye degradation, significantly outperforming than SCPFC which obtained the highest power generation (60.11 mW/cm2) and 18.93% dye degradation. The ZnO/Zn photoanode could be reused twice in DCPFC but only once in SCPFC. This study highlights the advantages of DCPFC in its’ performance and hence the design can be served as a model for the future reference. The optimized condition of DCPFC: contact time of 5-hour, and 10 ppm initial dye concentration at pH 3 was then used to test the performance of transition metal complexes as photocatalyst and compared to ZnO photocatalyst while ZnO photocatalyst acted as the standard in this study. Although the calculated band gap of synthesized transition metal complexes was lower compared to ZnO, the power generation and dye degradation efficient of transition metal complexes were lower than that of ZnO. Under the same condition, ZnO showed highest power generation of 172.75 mW/cm2 with 100% dye degradation while the highest power generation among transition metal complexes was only 120.96 mW/cm2 with 73.23% dye degradation performed by tris(acetylacetonato) Cobalt(III) [Co(acac)3]. Low stability was deduced to be the reason of the low performance of transition metal complexes as photocatalyst.

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