Enhanced co-production of high-quality syngas and highly-concentrated hydrogen via chemical looping steam methane reforming over Ni-substituted La0.6Ce0.4MnO3 oxygen carriers

Chemical looping steam methane reforming (CLSMR) is increasingly attracting more and more attention as a promising technology for co-production of syngas and hydrogen. However, low reactivity, poor selectivity and weak resistance to carbon deposition of oxygen carriers (OCs) probably discourage further commercial application of CLSMR. With this background, a novel strategy of incorporating Ce and Ni into LaMnO3 is advised to promote lattice oxygen migration rate and improve syngas selectivity. The redox activity and cycle stability of La0.6Ce0.4Mn1−xNixO3 for CLSMR are explored in a fixed-bed reactor coupling with various characterization methods. The characterization results show that La0.6Ce0.4Mn1−xNixO3 OCs still maintain the standard perovskite structures and well-ordered skeleton. The introduction of Ce3+ induces large amounts of oxygen vacancies on the surface of OCs and improve the syngas selectivity of methane reforming, leading to higher oxygen mobility and lower carbon deposition. Meanwhile, the experimental results also confirm that the doping of Ni into La0.6Ce0.4MnO3 can greatly improve the oxygen-donation ability and effectively provide more active sites for reaction with methane. While excessive Ni in perovskite will enhance the methane dissociation, which is the main reason of carbon deposits. The proper amount of Ni doping can well match the methane activation rate to migration rate of bulk lattice oxygen that is feasible to realize the balance between productivity and efficiency. In addition, the reduced metal elements along with great amounts of oxygen vacancies together contribute to more active sites for the following steam splitting which avails to produce high-purity H2. La0.6Ce0.4Mn0.7Ni0.3O3 oxygen carrier eventually achieve syngas yield of 2.8 mmol/g H2 and 1.4 mmol/g CO that is closed to the ideal value without obvious carbon deposition, and pure H2 yield of 3.8 mmol/g, exhibiting the best redox performance and good regenerability. Meanwhile, La0.6Ce0.4Mn0.7Ni0.3O3 can still maintain high redox activity and basic perovskite structure after 15 cyclic redox tests, illustrating a desirable stability and reliability. In summary, this study offers a valuable and effective strategy to tackle with the bottleneck of CLSMR, paving the way of doping transition metal as a pathway of modulating reaction performance and stability of OCs in chemical looping processes.