New PhD defense in the NEMEN group

On the 27^th of October Shiva Fazlikeshteli from NEMEN research group defensed her thesis “Partial oxidation of methane into syngas at low temperature” supervised by Xavier Vendrell and Jordi Llorca.

Syngas (composed by H₂ y CO) is a versatile raw material that can be used for production of a wide range of chemical products and fuels. For this reason there is a big interest in optimization and search for new ways of its production. The most common methods for syngas production are the steam reforming of methane (SRM), partial oxidation of methane (POM) and dry reforming of methane (DRM). In the thesis a number of monometallic (Pd, Ru, Ni) and bimetallic (Pd–Ni, Ru–Ni, Ru–Pd) catalysts on CeO₂ support using mecanochemical (BM) and incipient wetness impregnation (IWI) techniques were prepared. The results showed that a dry milling technique can be used for preparation of highly dispersed metallic species that interact strongly with the support of cerium. The use of this technique resulted in an improvement of the catalytic activity of POM, especially at low temperature, in comparison with the conventional IWI method. To determine the durability of the catalysts a number of long term stability tests during more than 100 hours were carried out. For characterization of the catalysts before and after the reaction the Raman spectroscopy, temperature programmed reduction (H₂-TPR), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and high resolution transmission electronic microscopy (HRTEM) were used.