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/alcontained 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 dualbed 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 xray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, and bet surface area are used to characterize the synthesized catalysts.