Abstract
There are several methods for the hydrogen production such as steam reforming of natural gas, photochemical method, biological method, electrolysis and thermochemical method, etc. Many researches have been widely performed for the hydrogen production method having low production cost and high efficiency. In this paper, the patents concerning the photochemical hydrogen production method were gathered and analyzed. The search range was limited in the open patents of USA(US), European Union(EP), Japan(JP), and Korea(KR) from 1996 to 2005. Patents were gathered by using key-words searching and filtered by filtering criteria. The patent application trend was analyzed by the years, countries, companies, and technologies.