In this work, the behaviour of several OCMs composed of
LSF731 and iron oxide for hydrogen production by chemical looping was investigated. The objective was to obtain a composite
structure with iron oxide clusters well dispersed and embedded
in an LSF731 matrix. The OCMs were prepared by two different
methods, i.e. mechanical mixing and a modified Pechini method,
with different iron oxide weight fractions, 11 and 30 wt.%. SEM pictures and EDX analysis confirmed that the desired structure could
be obtained. Although sub-micron powder and 20–40 lm powder
of iron oxide were used to study the effect of the iron oxide nominal cluster size on reactivity, a clear conclusion could not be made
since some agglomeration of the sub-micron powder took place
during the preparation resulting in little difference between actual
cluster sizes.