Development of Reforming Catalyst for Hydrogen Production and Its Suitability for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell

Abstract

Hydrogen as an energy carrier has a potential to replace fossil fuel and meet the rising demand without compromising with the environment. The high efficiency to generate power from hydrogen comes when it is integrated with proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). However, PEMFC needs high-purity hydrogen (purity more than 99.99%) with CO content lower than 10 mg/L. Methanol steam reforming reaction has the potential to produce H2, and its performance is mainly relying on the type of reforming catalyst which should bear the ability to have low CO selectivity. In our current work, a series of copper-based reforming catalysts were synthesized by incipient impregnation method and examined for steam reforming of methanol reaction with steam to carbon molar ratio of 3:1 and up to a temperature range of (200–350 ℃) at atmospheric pressure conditions. The characterization of the prepared catalysts was carried out by using XRD diffraction, Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) surface area and FESEM-EDX techniques. The promotional effect of gallium over the copper catalyst was investigated for hydrogen generation. Among all the synthesized catalysts, gallium oxide modified Cu-Fe catalyst which shows low CO selectivity (less than 1%) even at elevated temperature and higher methanol conversion compared to the undoped gallium catalyst.