CO preferential oxidation under H2-rich streams on copper oxide supported on Fe promoted CeO2

• Fe addition to copper/ceria catalyst for CO-PROX has been studied.
• Fe-promoted sample outperforms, mainly in terms of selectivity.
• HRTEM and XPS revealed enhanced copper dispersion on Fe-promoted catalyst.
• TPRs suggest H2 activation delayed at higher temperature on Fe-promoted sample.

In this work the effect of Fe addition to copper/ceria catalysts on the catalytic activity toward CO-PROX reaction has been studied and related to the modification of textural and redox properties induced by iron. Catalysts have been characterized by the use of BET surface area measure, X-ray diffraction (XRD), high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and TPR with different reducing mixtures (CO/N2 and/or H2/N2). Results show that iron promotes a superficial enrichment of highly dispersed copper sites improving catalyst reducibility, especially under CO-containing mixture, thus resulting in an enhanced selectivity of CO-PROX reaction.

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