Plenary speaker

Biography

Professor Ir Dr Nor Aishah Saidina Amin graduated with a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology. A fellow of Academy of Science, Malaysia and IChemE, UK, she is also a professional engineer. She has more than 200 ISI/Scopus indexed publications and is the Head of Chemical Reaction Engineering Group (CREG) at UTM. She is an editorial board member of ECM, Catalysts, IOPSci Notes and Frontiers in Catalysis. She was a research scholar at MIT and University of Kentucky under the MIT-UTM and Fulbright fellowships, respectively. Her field of expertise is in catalytic reaction engineering and reactor modeling.

Speech details

PROGRESS IN CATALYTIC TRANSFORMATION OF BIOMASS-DERIVED HYDROCARBONS TO HYDROGEN

The environmental deterioration caused by the amplified rate of conventional fossil fuel consumption has triggered the need to seek for renewable and sustainable energy sources to alleviate environmental issues. Hydrogen,  a clean fuel, is the most promising alternative energy carrier for power generation, fuel cells and transportation. The development of high-performance catalysts in the catalytic transformation of biomass-derived hydrocarbons is the key to achieving green hydrogen energy production for fulfilling the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Various processes have been explored, including steam reforming, photocatalytic reforming, and non-thermal plasma dry reforming to convert biomass derivatives such as carbon dioxide, methane and tar to hydrogen. The catalytic performance in the reaction is  affected by the intrinsic properties of a catalyst, which depend on the selection of atomic metals, alloying of multi-metals, control of nanoparticle sizing and effective support modification. The critical factor to be considered is to align the target reactant with catalyst structure design, physical morphology properties, particle size and surface chemical properties to achieve the optimum catalytic performance and high hydrogen yield.  In addition, the application of multi-metallic alloys provides higher performance as compared to the respective monometallic catalysts due to the synergistic effect. For oxygenated carbon and light hydrocarbons, strong metal-support interaction, basicity and oxidative nature have profound effects on the conversion to hydrogen. For heavier hydrocarbons such as toluene, the weak metal-support interaction and stronger acidity are more appealing in achieving prolonged catalytic reforming stability for hydrogen production. Hence, careful consideration in designing an effective and highly selective reforming catalyst is imperative for improving the catalytic performance for hydrogen production.