Abstract Glycerol hydrogenolysis is one of the important ways to obtain high value-added chemicals from biomass derivatives. Bimetallic platinum-nickel catalysts supported on γ-Al2O3 were prepared by co-impregnation, and characterized by using powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), N2 physical adsorption, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), temperature-programmed reduction (TPR) and X-ray photoelectron spectra (XPS). The metal-metal interaction and the formation of PtNi alloy cluster in the bimetallic Pt-Ni catalyst produced synergistic effect and exhibited a much higher selectivity toward ethylene glycol than monometallic catalysts Pt/γ-Al2O3 and Ni/γ-Al2O3. The bimetallic catalyst with a loading of 2%Pt and 15%Ni showed the highest selectivity toward ethylene glycol, which was 28.4%, with a glycerol conversion of 94.8% conversion and a selectivity of 58.2% to 1,2-PDO.
