High-performance catalyst of methanol steam reformer based on Cu foam with nanofiber architectures

Abstract

Steam reforming of methanol is an effective way to provide an on-line hydrogen source for fuel cells. However, due to the poor utilization of the performance of the catalyst, the traditional reformer has the problems of slow start-up, low hydrogen production. Therefore, it is urgent to develop new catalyst loading methods to make full use of the performance of the catalyst. In this paper, a foamed metal with nano copper wire is used for methanol-reformer. The relevant experiments were carried out to investigate the hydrogen production performance of the foam copper reformer based on nano copper wire and the traditional impregnation method. The results showed that compared with the metal foam autocatalysis, the hydrogen concentration in the product of the nano-copper wire reformer could be increased by more than 8 times. What's more, the concentration of hydrogen in the product is twice that of the current widely used impregnation method. Furthermore, this method reduced the start-up time of the reformer. Meanwhile, the best working parameters of nano copper wire methanol-reformer were obtained through experiments.