Structural Characterization of Ni/ZrO2/SiO2 Nanocomposites Prepared by Wet Impregnation Route

Abstract

Investigation of hydrogenation catalytic application has become an interesting subject area by many experts, especially in nanoscience and nanotechnology. In general, metal-based SiO2 and ZrO2 composites become one of the promising materials to be applied as a hydrogenation support catalyst. In this work, we report the synthesis of Ni/SiO2/ZrO2 nanocomposites by using impregnation route. The characterization was done by means of XRD, XRF and SEM to investigate the structural, elemental compositional and morphological behaviors of the samples. Based on the data analysis, it showed that the presence of ZrO2 during synthesis causes the crystallinity change of the SiO2 from crystallite to amorphous phase. The addition of Ni loading altered the XRD pattern originating from amorphous SiO2 and crystallite growth of the samples. Meanwhile, the elemental analysis exhibited that the change of metal composition in concomitant with the addition of Ni and Zr. Furthermore, the microscopy analysis showed that the samples have agglomerated shape in nanometric size. Therefore, the prepared Ni/ZrO2/SiO2 in this work opens the potential to be applied as hydrogenation catalyst.