Scaling between areas of electrolyzer electrodes and solar modules achieving over 15 % solar to hydrogen conversion efficiency: Silicon and CIGS

Oleksii Omelianovych, Ngoc-Anh Nguyen, Liudmila Larina, Inchan Hwang, Kihwan Kim, Byeonggwan Kim, Donghyeop Shin and Ho-Suk Choi

Renewable Energy, 2025, vol. 251, issue C

Abstract: This study aims to maximize the efficiency of solar-to-hydrogen generation systems by optimizing the relative areas of the electrodes and solar modules. The core objective is to identify the optimal balance between these components to achieve the highest energy conversion efficiency. We conducted a series of experiments using lab-scale silicon and copper indium gallium selenide solar modules, along with platinum on carbon and ruthenium dioxide-based electrocatalyst electrodes. By increasing the area of the water-splitting electrodes while decreasing the solar module area, we achieved solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiencies of 12.30 % for the silicon module and 15.34 % for the copper indium gallium selenide module. Our findings indicate that the optimal ratio between the electrode and solar module areas depends on the type of solar module. To better understand this relationship, we analyzed the normalized current-voltage characteristics of the solar modules, which allowed us to evaluate the system's potential to reach the maximum theoretical efficiency. Additionally, we introduce the concept of coupling effectiveness to quantify how efficiently the integrated system utilizes captured solar energy. In this study, we achieved a coupling effectiveness of 85.7 %, which is the highest value reported to date for similar systems.

Keywords: Solar to hydrogen conversion; CIGS solar module; Silicon solar module; Solar energy storage; Water-splitting electrolyzer design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148125011164
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:251:y:2025:i:c:s0960148125011164

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2025.123454

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().