Facile one-pot synthesis of highly dispersed Ni nanoparticles embedded in HMS for dry reforming of methane

Abstract

Mesoporous silica-supported Ni can serve as alternative effective catalysts for dry reforming of methane. However, conventional synthesis method requires long synthetic time and high cost, and the resulting catalysts show unsatisfactory catalytic stability due to coking and sintering. In this paper, we reported a facile, low-cost and environmental benign method to introduce Ni species into HMS mesoporous silica (Ni-HMS) in a self-assembled way. FT-IR, H2-TPR, and TEM manifested that the obtained Ni-HMS established uniform distributed Ni particles (3.9±0.5nm) and strong metal-support interaction derives from Si-O-Ni bonding. The dry reforming of methane results demonstrated that the Ni-HMS showed more active and stable catalytic performance than that of Ni impregnated HMS catalyst (Ni/HMS). Notably, the catalytic activity was well maintained even after reacting at 700°C for 100h. HAADF-STEM and TG-DSC revealed that coking and sintering were unnoticeable over the endurance-tested Ni-HMS catalysts. The strong anchor effect of pore wall to Ni nanoparticles inherent to the one-pot synthesis was suggested to be the original reason for enhanced resistance toward coking and sintering.