Synthesis & Characterization of Zirconia Promoted Cu/ZnO/Al2O3 Catalyst for Methanol Synthesis Via Hydrogenation of CO2

Nowadays, issues on global warming of the world atmosphere have continously become more and more important. Due to global warming, our environment encounter the problem called climate change that will result in very catasthropic event and diseases. This CO2 are the primary cause of global warming. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has steadily increased owing to human activity and this accelerates the green house effect. One of the best route to remedy CO2 is by tranforming it to reusable hydrocarbon such as methanol that is very usefull in our routine life (Jeffrey, 2005). A number of studies on this reaction have been reported over copper, Cu-based catalysts. CuO/ZnO/Al2O3 catalyst, a very typical methanol synthesis catalyst from CO2, is being investigated very actively for this reaction, but the investigations of other ternary catalysts are comparatively few (Naofumi Nomura, 1998). This paper is mainly a study on development of Cu/ZnO/ZrO2 for CO2 hydrogenation for methanol process. The author is focusing on the effect of catalyst composition. Mainly, in this paper the author were to study the catalytic system comprising copper-based hydrogenation catalyst and solid acid catalyst. Besides that, the job is to characterize the physical properties of the catalyst. In order to complete this project, the author will need some tools and apparatus to characterize the catalyst. The equipments used are Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM) and FESEM – Energy Dispersed X-ray (EDX).