Potential Application of Metal–organic frameworks for Photocatalytic Water Splitting

Abstract

These days, the environmental pollution and energy shortage are the crucial global issues. Therefore, replacing the renewable source of energy with the fossil fuels is the most promising approach to solve the aforementioned problems. Hydrogen is an attractive source energy because of its high energy density and its combustion by-product is only water. Hydrogen production through photosplitting of water over a semiconductor based photocatalyst is a desirable approach to diminish the global energy and environmental problems. However, its low solar conversion efficiency and finding suitable photocatalyst still remain as the main challenge for this system. Recently metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) have received great attention for the photocatalytic hydrogen production due to their large surface to volume ratio, design flexibility, and well-defined porosity. In this short review, we focus on the previous studies on the various types of MOFs based photocatalyst in the solar hydrogen production system. The main intention of review is to highlight the importance of coupling molecular approaches of catalyst design with materials science strategies in the improvement of MOFs based photocatalysts, which will undoubtedly lead to a very bright future for photocatalytic water.