Hydrogen generation by light-induced water splitting using ZnO single crystals

Abstract

This paper presents experimental results of implementation of ZnO single crystals as photoanodes in photoelectrochemical (PEC) cells for hydrogen generation from water splitting. Both, as-grown and annealed in oxidizing atmosphere ZnO single crystals were investigated. It was found that as-grown ZnO single crystals possess much higher conversion efficiencies than annealed in O2. The photocurrent density was found to increase significantly with the increase of external bias applied and excitation light intensity.