A Review on the Hydrogen Production Process by Photocatalytic Water Splitting

Today, because of safety and environmental reasons, the necessity to find the alternatives to fossil fuels is obvious. Hydrogen is a suitable and potentially alternative energy to fossil fuels and various technologies have been developed to produce this fuel source. Conventional technologies for hydrogen production cause large amount of the greenhouse carbon dioxide gas that are associated with environmental problems. Due to the importance of renewable energy, the use of photocatalyst and sunlight for water splitting and hydrogen production is a favorite method. In this process, water as a raw material and sunlight as an energy source are used. In this review paper, the process of water splitting to produce hydrogen by photocatalytic process will be studied and types of used photocatalysts in this process and also the ways to improve the efficiency of this process will be investigated and also recent researches in this field to develop this process will be discussed.