With increasing attention on energy and environment, need for highly efficient energy conversion systems with clean fuels also increases. Fuel cells have been considered to be one of solutions for this purpose. Among them, polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells are close to commercialization. However, they require highly pure hydrogen as fuel, which necessitates a rather complex fuel processor where conventional hydrocarbon is transformed into hydrogen through a series of catalytic processes including steam reformer and water-gas shifter. Since 0.5 ~ 1 % CO exists in a hydrogen stream after a water-gas shifter, an additional step is required to clean up CO. The selective CO oxidation with O2 externally provided is a quite effective way to achieve this goal. A number of catalyst systems including noble metal and transition metal oxides have been disclosed. However, further works should be carried out to guarantee the catalyst lifetime and wide operating conditions. In this work, the effect of Ru particle size on the catalytic activity for this reaction was examined. As a model catalyst, we chose Ru/k-Al2O3, which was reported to show the good performance for this reaction among alumina-supported Ru catalysts. A variety of characterization techniques were employed to find out the correlation between the Ru particle size and the catalytic activity.

Effect of Ru particle size on selective CO oxidation in a H2-rich stream over Ru/k-Al2O3

246th National Meeting (2013)

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