Nickel catalysts supported on La2O3-modified KIT-6 for the methane dry reforming reaction

Nickel catalysts are vulnerable to suffering from carbon deposition and metal sintering in the methane dry reforming process under high temperature. Based on these problems, in this paper, La2O3–KIT-6 materials with different La2O3 contents were designed and prepared in order to take advantage of the basic sites of La2O3 and rich mesoporous structure of KIT-6, and then nickel catalysts supported on La2O3–KIT-6 materials were synthesized. In contrast, the Ni/KIT-6 catalyst was also prepared by the same method. XRD, TEM, SEM, physisorption of N2, XPS, H2-TPR, Raman, and TG were used for fresh and spent catalysts characterization in this work. The catalytic performance of these Ni/La2O3–KIT-6 catalysts was tested under high temperature methane dry reforming reaction. Our work showed that the La2O3-modified catalysts showed reasonably superior catalytic activity and high long term stability compared with the nickel catalyst supported on KIT-6 without modification of La2O3. The high dispersion of nickel nanoparticles on La2O3–KIT-6 as well as the basic property of La2O3 were both helpful to the resistance towards carbon deposition, and the interaction between Ni nanoparticles and support material in Ni/La2O3–KIT-6 was helpful to the resistance towards nickel sintering on account of the special physicochemical properties of La2O3.