Facile Surfactant-Assisted Synthesis of BiVO₄ Nanoparticulate Films for Solar Water Splitting

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This article was full of content and comprehensive analysis, authors developed a simple synthesis of < 200 nm monoclinic BiVO4 nanoparticles, which were further deposited on transparent conductive substrates by spin-coating and calcined obtaining nanostructured films. But there are still some problems to be solved.

1. The authors state that the catalyst had a high specific surface area and whether additional BET tests are needed to obtain detailed data.
2. Some experimental phenomena preferably required more detailed explanation, such as why the films with different thicknesseshad different light absorption abilities and the 10 and 20 layers had nearly identical light absorption abilities.
3. To better explain nanostructuring of BiVO4 was demonstrated to display a positive effect on functional performance of photoelectrodes, photoelectrochemical characterization of calcined BiVO4 preferably requiring a supplement

Author Response

Please see the attached file with our detailed reponse to Reviewer 1.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

In this paper, BiVO₄ nanoparticle photocatalyst was synthesized by a surfactant-assistant method and later deposited onto a conductive substrates by spin-coating for photoanode. The BiVO₄ nanoparticle photocatalyst was characterized by XRD, SEM, Raman, FTIR, and the photoanode was characterized by UV-vis, and photoelectrochemical characterizations. The reported photoanode showed an enhanced photocurrent and decreased onset potential by incorporating surfactant during synthesis. The overall work is interesting, though it does not present high performance compared with the start-of-art. Specific comments are below:

1. In the introduction section the authors discussed three different crystalline structure of BiVO₄ and their phase transition at different temperatures, however, I do not see any relationship between this discussion with results the authors presented later. Before or after calcination, prepared BiVO₄ were all in monoclinic phase.
2. 2, In Page 2 line 46, the authors stated that “…preferentially exposed {011} facets that exhibits higher surface photovoltage…”. The nanoparticles in this work are presumably polycrystalline, what is the preferential exposed facet? This can by characterized from TEM lattice spacing.
3. In Page 2 line 84, the authors stated that “…but they have a poor control on the seed surface-modification processes…”. However, how the authors avoid this limitation was not discussed in the paper.
4. From the SEM image (Fig. 3d), nanoparticles were not uniformly distributed and many of the FTO surface were not covered with photocatalyst, will increasing the deposit layers (more than 50 layers) further increase the photocurrent?

Author Response

Please find attached our detailed reponse to reviewer 2.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

accept in present form