Study of reaction parameters for the CO2-Free Methane Decomposition using Fe-based Catalysts

GHGs are one of the greatest threats of this century, and catalysis is playing a crucial role in reducing their emission. New technologies are emerging, and among them, the hydrogen economy seems to be one of the most promising approaches. This thesis project wants to explore turquoise hydrogen production, focusing on methane catalytic decomposition and specifically how to fine tune the reaction parameters to obtain high H2 yields and carbon nanotubes as by-product. From an environmental perspective, despite the already known Ni-based catalysts, iron has been chosen as the active phase and Fe-based catalysts are synthesized with different amounts of loading to understand the effect of catalyst composition on the reaction performance. By selecting the optimum Fe-loading and catalyst pretreatment as well as the reaction parameters (Temperature, GHSV) a good trade-off between the quality of CNTs even the H2 production was achieved. XRD, Raman, TEM and SEM analysis were conducted before and after the reaction as a tool to analyze the above parameters and to fully understand the structure and behavior of the catalysts for each condition.