The role of Au, Cu & CeO2 and their interactions for an enhanced WGS performance

•Development of highly efficient multicomponent Au/Ce1-xCuxO2/Al2O3 catalysts for the WGS reaction.•Understanding the role of Au, Cu, CeO2 and their interactions to achieve good catalytic activity.•Ce-Cu synergy and Au-support interaction as key features controlling catalyst's reducibility, oxygen vacancies population and oxygen storage capacity.•The multicomponent catalysts present enough long term stability and tolerance towards start-up/shut-downs situations.

The WGS reaction over multicomponent Au/Ce1-xCuxO2/Al2O3 catalysts is studied in this work. The systems are carefully designed aiming to take advantage of every active phase included in the formulation: gold, ceria and copper. Special emphasis is given to the CeO2-CuO synergy and its influence on the displayed catalytic performance with and without gold. To this aim a meaningful correlation between the physicochemical properties of the mixed materials and their activity/stability is proposed. In general terms the developed catalysts present high activity under realistic WGS reaction conditions, with fairly good long term stability. In addition, the systems successfully withstand start-up/shut-downs situations, indispensable requisite for real applications in the field of pure hydrogen production for fuel cell goals.

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