Boosting performance for hydrogenation-alkylation tandem reaction catalyzed by banana-like MgO-based solid solution confined Ni-Co alloy catalyst: Fabricated by a MTV-MOFs templated strategy

Abstract

Developing highly efficient MOFs derived alloy catalysts for the one-pot tandem catalytic reactions remains a challenge. In this work, a novel solid-solution confined NiCo alloy catalyst incorporating carbon (termed as NiCo/MgO-C) with banana-like morphology has been synthesized via a self-templating strategy for directing pyrolysis of well-defined Ni-Co-Mg tri-metallic MOFs (termed as Ni-Co-Mg@H2dhbdc, H2dhbdc represents 2,5-dihydroxytelephthalic acid organic linker). The developed NiCo/MgO-C catalyst was applied for the hydrogenation-alkylation tandem catalytic reaction. Owing to the unique structural (e.g., highly dispersed, small size of NiCo nanoparticles, enhanced transfer of electron density) as well as NiCo alloy advantages, the developed NiCo/MgO-C catalyst derived from Ni-Co-Mg@H2dhbdc MOFs delivers excellent superior catalytic performance for the hydrogenation-alkylation tandem reaction to those of bimetallic MOFs (Ni-Mg@H2dhbdc and Co-Mg@H2dhbdc, respectively) derived catalysts (Ni/MgO-C and Co/MgO-C, respectively). Notably, the tri-metallic Ni-Co-Mg@H2dhbdc served as the precursor for synthesis of developed catalyst could enhance the reduction degree of NiO/CoO species confined in NiOCoO-MgO solid-solution during the pyrolysis process to some extent. Therefore, we anticipated that this tri-metallic MOFs-templated strategy may provide a facile and controllable way for synthesis of solid-solution supported nanoalloy catalysts for the other heterogeneous catalytic reactions.