Experimental study on hydrogen production characteristics of kaolin supported Ni catalyzed by steam gasification of citrus peel

This work aims to reveal the advantages of Ni/kaolin and to explore its influence on the gasification reaction characteristics in a fixed-bed reaction system. It was shown that 10 wt% was the optimum loading of Ni, when the carbon conversion efficiency was 84.54 % and the hydrogen yield was 36.79 mmol/g(biomass). According to the evolutionary behavior of gas products and kinetic analysis, it is known that when using 10 wt% Ni/kaolin, it accelerated the precipitation of volatiles and the reaction, greatly improved the carbon conversion efficiency of the reaction, and increased the instantaneous hydrogen yield from 4.26 mmol/(g(biomass)center dot min) without catalyst to 5.12 mmol/(g(biomass)center dot min) and the total yield of hydrogen was also increased to 60.70 mmol/gbiomass. The catalytic effect of 10 wt% Ni/kaolin was caused by the Ni(1 1 1) crystalline facets generation on the support surface, that could promote the cleavage of carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds of tar.