الفهرس 
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Abstract
Photoelectrochemical water splitting can be regarded as a promising technology for renewable hydrogen production. In the current work, a facile hydrothermal synthesis method was followed to obtain TiO2 flowerlike structure directly grown on conductive glass substrates with different stacking patterns. Moreover, three different gold deposition methods namely, photoreduction method (PR), Turkevich method (TK) and a combination of both methods (CM) were employed to decorate the formed flower-like structures with Au nanoparticles. Each deposition technique affected the size, size distribution, loading, surface coverage and shape of the obtained gold nanoparticles (GNPs). Using the PR technique, the photocurrent increased 3.5-fold compared to the bare flower-like structures. Employing the TK method, narrow sized GNPs distribution was obtained yielding a 6.15-fold increase in the value of the photocurrent. Using the CM approach, a 1.21, 26.86 and 12.79-fold increase were observed for the value of the current density as compared to the corresponding bare samples. All samples showed a stable chronoamperometric performance under illumination without any signs for photo-corrosion or performance deterioration. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy has shown that the CM approach decreased the semiconductor/electrolyte interfacial resistance to 37, 2.5 and 3.1% of its value for the bare samples. Bode phase plots showed that the stacked flower-like structures can be considered as electron hole recombination centres leading to an observable broadening of the maximum frequency peak.