Investigation of a novel porous anodic alumina plate for methane steam reforming: Hydrothermal stability, electrical heating possibility and reforming reactivity

A plate-type alumina support was synthesized through a novel anodization technology followed by a hot water treatment, which resulted in the drastically enlargement of support BET surface area from 16.5 to 204.6 g/m², and such BET value is even comparable to some commercial alumina supports. A high thermal stability of this kind of porous anodic alumina support was shown because as much as 63% of surface area remained after the support subjected to 700 °C air calcination for 50 h. Innovatively, an electrical heating pattern was allowed over this plate support due to the existence of Fe-Cr-Ni alloy interlayer among the support. Our work showed that the utilization of electrical heating pattern would shorten the reformer start-up time from 1 to 2 h to just a few minutes. With the porous anodic alumina support, a 17.9-wt% Ni catalyst with nickel aluminate layer was synthesized and its reforming reactivity was investigated during stationary and DSS SRM at 700 °C, under usual and electrical heating pattern. It showed excellent SRM reactivity and no deactivation was evidenced during 500 h stationary test and 100 times start-stop cycles DSS SRM test. Nevertheless, for the industrialization, some efforts should be made to alleviate the sintering of anodic supports, because after subjected to a hydrothermal treatment at 700 °C for 50 h, only 36% of surface area was kept.