Highly effective hydrogen production from steam reforming of methanol over SBA-15-modified Cu/ZnO/Al2O3 catalysts

Siliceous mesoporous SBA-15 has been proposed as a new effective structural promoter to prepare highly effective SiO2-modified Cu/ZnO/Al2O3 catalysts for hydrogen production. It was demonstrated that the SBA-15 modified catalyst exhibited superior performance in terms of methanol conversion and suppressed formation of CO during steam reforming of methanol. It was suggested that the intrinsic nature of SBA-15 should favor the generation of modified catalyst with much larger metallic copper surface area and improve copper dispersion. In addition, it was shown by in situ XRD that a considerable increase of the microstrain of Cu nanocrystals could be achieved in the catalysts modified by SBA-15, which correlates well with the enhanced CH3OH conversion as observed on the corresponding samples.