Improved CO-PROX Performance of CuO/CeO2 Catalysts by Using Nanometric Ceria as Support

Despite of the huge number of papers about the catalytic preferential oxidation of CO (CO-PROX) for the purification of H-2 streams, there is still a need for more effective catalysts in order to reduce the large required catalyst volume of CO-PROX unity. In this work, large surface area nanometric ceria was used as support for CuO/CeO2 catalysts with CuO load up to 10 wt % easily dispersed by wet impregnation. Catalysts were characterized by ICP-MS, XRD, SEM/EDS, N-2 physisorption, H-2 temperature programmed reduction (TPR), and CO2 temperature programmed desorption (TPD) and tested under different reaction conditions (including under feed containing inhibiting species such as CO2 and H2O). Catalytic tests revealed that our samples show high activity and selectivity even under stringent reaction conditions; moreover, they result among the most active catalysts when compared to those reported in the scientific literature. The high activity can be related to the enhanced amount of highly dispersed copper sites in strong interaction with ceria related to the nature of the nanometric support, as evidenced by the characterization techniques. Despite the high concentration of active copper sites, catalytic performance is limited by CO2 desorption from ceria in the neighborhood of copper sites, which prevents a further improvement. This suggests that new catalyst formulations should also provide a lower affinity towards CO2.