Effect of Pt on Zn-Free Cu-Al Catalysts for Methanol Steam Reforming to Produce Hydrogen

Steam reforming of methanol can be considered as an attractive reaction aiming at hydrogen production for PEM fuel cells. Although Cu/Al-contained catalysts are considerably evaluated in this reaction, further evaluation is essential to evaluate the impact of some promoters like Pt in order to find a comprehensively optimized catalyst. Pt promoter is employed with different methods in this study. Firstly, the amount of Cu loading in Cu/Al ratio is optimized via coprecipitation method. The sample containing 30% wt. of Cu exhibits better performance with methanol conversion of 70% and CO selectivity of 0.44%. Besides, impregnating a different amount of Pt onto Al2O3 reveals an inadequate potential for this reaction. In contrary, doping Pt into Cu/Al catalyst increases the methanol conversion as high as 81% and CO selectivity reaches to approximately zero at 270 °C. In addition, using a dual-bed reactor including Cu/Al and Pt/Al2O3 catalyst displays a relatively satisfactory performance by which the conversion and selectivity are found 83.7% and 1.5%, respectively. In this study, analyses of X-Ray Diffraction, Scanning Electron Microscopy, and BET surface area are used to characterize the synthesized catalysts.