New progress has been made in the study of hydrogen production by hydrazine decomposition in Dalian Chemical Institute

Hydrogen production process using new type nickel-alumina catalyst to decompose hydrazine

Recently, a research team led by Zhang Tao, a researcher at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has made important progress in the hydrogen production from hydrazine decomposition. For the first time, they used an inexpensive nickel catalyst to efficiently decompose hydrazine hydrate to produce hydrogen at room temperature. The research results were published in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.d.

Hydrazine (N2H4) is an important liquid propellant, widely used in the attitude and orbit control of various space vehicles. Hydrazine combines with water to form hydrazine hydrate (N2H4 • H2O), and its properties become relatively stable. At the same time, hydrazine hydrate still has a hydrogen mass density of up to 8%, so it can be used as an ideal hydrogen storage material to meet the hydrogen used in special occasions. need. The difficulty of this process lies in the development of high-performance catalysts, which need to improve their hydrogen production selectivity and activity under mild conditions. The existing research results are mainly concentrated on precious metal alloy nanoparticle catalysts, and the development of non-noble metal catalysts to achieve the efficient decomposition of hydrazine hydrate under normal temperature conditions to produce hydrogen is very challenging.

The team led by Researcher Zhang Tao has long been devoted to the research of hydrazine decomposition catalysts, and has carried out systematic basic research around the efficient use and substitution of precious metals. This time, they used a hydrotalcite material as a precursor to prepare a new type of nickel-alumina catalyst. The material combines high metal dispersion and strong alkalinity, and can completely decompose hydrazine hydrate at room temperature. 98%.

This work is the first time that the process of non-noble metal catalysts efficiently decomposing hydrazine hydrate to produce hydrogen at room temperature has provided new ideas for the development of efficient hydrogen sources.

The above research was supported by related projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.