Facile construction of composition-tuned ruthenium-nickel nanoparticles on g-C3N4 for enhanced hydrolysis of ammonia borane without base additives

Abstract

Developing high-efficiency and low-cost catalysts for hydrogen evolution from hydrolysis of ammonia borane (AB) is significant and critical for the exploitation and utilization of hydrogen energy. Herein, the in-situ fabrication of well-dispersed and small bimetallic RuNi alloy nanoparticles (NPs) with tuned compositions and concomitant hydrolysis of AB are successfully achieved by using graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) as a NP support without additional stabilizing ligands. The optimized Ru1Ni7.5/g-C3N4 catalyst exhibits an excellent catalytic activity with a high turnover frequency of 901 min−1 and an activation energy of 28.46 kJ mol−1 without any base additives, overtaking the activities of many previously reported catalysts for AB hydrolysis. The kinetic studies indicate that the AB hydrolysis over Ru1Ni7.5/g-C3N4 is first-order and zero-order reactions with respect to the catalyst and AB concentrations, respectively. Ru1Ni7.5/g-C3N4 has a good recyclability with 46% of the initial catalytic activity retained even after five runs. The high performance of Ru1Ni7.5/g-C3N4 should be assigned to the small-sized alloy NPs with abundant accessible active sites and the synergistic effect between the composition-tuned Ru–Ni bimetals. This work highlights a potentially powerful and simple strategy for preparing highly active bimetallic alloy catalysts for AB hydrolysis to generate hydrogen.