Recent Progress in Metal-Organic Frameworks for Applications in Electrocatalytic and Photocatalytic Water Splitting

The development of clean and renewable energy materials as alternatives to fossil fuels is foreseen as a potential solution to the crucial problems of environmental pollution and energy shortages. Hydrogen is an ideal energy material for the future, and water splitting using solar/electrical energy is one way to generate hydrogen. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of porous materials with unique properties that have received rapidly growing attention in recent years for applications in water splitting due to their remarkable design flexibility, ultra-large surface-to-volume ratios and tunable pore channels. This review focuses on recent progress in the application of MOFs in electrocatalytic and photocatalytic water splitting for hydrogen generation, including both oxygen and hydrogen evolution. It starts with the fundamentals of electrocatalytic and photocatalytic water splitting and the related factors to determine the catalytic activity. The recent progress in the exploitation of MOFs for water splitting is then summarized, and strategies for designing MOF-based catalysts for electrocatalytic and photocatalytic water splitting are presented. Finally, major challenges in the field of water splitting are highlighted, and some perspectives of MOF-based catalysts for water splitting are proposed.