A high activity Al-Bi@C for hydrogen generation from Al-water reaction

A high activity carbon-loaded Bi (Bi@C) is synthesized by carbonizing a home-made Bi metal coordination compound. The results show that Bi@C effectively catalyzes the Al-H2O reaction. Al-Bi@C composites are prepared by ball milling (named as Al-Bi@C-milled) or ball milling and spark plasma sintering (SPS) (named as Al-Bi@C-SPS). It can be found that the Al-Bi@C-SPS obtained by sintered Al-Bi@C-milled is converted from a powder to a block, which is beneficial for its practical application. Furthermore, the hydrogen generation performance of Al-Bi@C-SPS is superior to that of Al-Bi@C-milled. Such as the hydrogen yield of Al-5 wt% Bi@C-SPS is higher than that of Al-5 wt% Bi@C-milled (1292.0 mL g(-1) vs 463.8 mL g(-1)), and Al-5 wt% Bi@C-SPS also exhibits an excellent antioxidant ability. These results demonstrate that the SPS process is beneficial. The improvement mechanism of SPS on Al-Bi@C composites is studied by XRD, Raman spectroscopy, SEM-EDS and TEM. The fabricated Al-Bi@C-SPS is expected to have practical application in the field of hydrogen supply.