Payvand.com - According to the research reporter of ISNA, the researchers in the Iranian university of Science and Industry managed to synthetically produce a durable catalyst for the process of reforming Methane and Carbon Dioxide.

Dr Mehran, a graduate from the chemistry department of the Science and Industry University said: This catalyst is used in petrochemical industries to transform the natural gas into synthetic gas (mixture of Hydrogen and Carbon Monoxide). The reforming process is normally done by using vapour bath or partial oxidation.

Member of the Chemistry Department of Kashan University added: With the new catalyst the process is done in a dry environment and has the advantage of using two green house gases, namely Methane and Carbon Dioxide.

Dr Rezaii said: In conventional methods of reforming using vapour bath, the ratio of Hydrogen to Carbon Monoxide is between thee and six, which can be obtained by the dry reforming process as well.

This member of the scientific board of Kashan University said: The main difficulty in the reforming process is that the catalysts becomes inactive very quickly; but in the new material, the base for the catalysts is Zirconium Dioxide instead of Nickel which is produced by using the nanotechnology synthetically.

He added: The conventional catalysts become inactive after five hours but the synthetic ones can last more than 1550 hours, which has been tested. There has not been such sustainability in such catalysts up to now.

The graduate of the chemistry department added: The use of nanotechnology in this process makes it feasible for industrial production on a larger scale.

It should be noted this scheme was the subject of the Doctoral thesis of Mehran Rezaii with the consultation of Dr Seyed Mehdi Alavi and Dr Saeed Sahebdel and the collaboration of the Danish company Haldor Topsoe A/S and Chinese CNPC company (Chinese Petrol University); the results of these researches have been published in more than 10 articles and presented in various international conferences.

Note: Original article published in Persian by ISNA.
Translated for Payvand.com by BMarz translators: http://www.BMarz.com

... Payvand News - 01/29/08 ... --