Hydrogen production from catalytic steam reforming of toluene over trace of Fe and Mn doping Ni/Attapulgite

Abstract

Tar formation has become the bottleneck of biomass gasification due to it serious impacts the gas quality and device safety. Catalytic steam reforming (CSR) is a potential technology that can utilize tar to produce hydrogen. In this work, a series of NixFeyMn/ATP (x, y = 0, 0.1, 0.5, 1 wt%) catalysts were successfully prepared by a sol-gel assisted impregnation method and applied to CSR of toluene, among which toluene was adopted as the biomass tar model. The characterization results of XRD, N2 adsorption-desorption, HRTEM, H2-TPR, NH3/CO2/O2-TPD and XPS demonstrated that the addition of trace of Fe and Mn promoted the uniform dispersion of active Ni metal and increased the reducibility and enhanced CO2 adsorption ability of Ni-based catalysts. Among them, Ni0.5Fe0.5Mn/ATP catalyst exhibited the highest toluene conversion (99.2 %) and H2 yield (80.1 %) and superior stability. This attributes to it has the highest Ni0/Ni2+ proportion and the cooperative effect of electron transfer among the Ni, Fe and Mn components. Additionally, the spent catalysts are characterized by HRTEM, XRD, TG-DTG and Raman. It confirms that trace of Fe and Mn doping improved the catalytic stability is ascribed to the inhibition of amorphous carbon and the growth of carbon nanotubes does not affect the availability of active sites.