Glucose-Assisted Preparation of a Nickel–Molybdenum Carbide Bimetallic Catalyst for Chemoselective Hydrogenation of Nitroaromatics and Hydrodeoxygenation of m-Cresol

Abstract

Developing a safe, facile, clean, low-cost, and scalable new method to replace the conventional methane reductive carburization process for preparing carbon-nanotube, coverage-free, highly dispersed, metal carbide based bimetallic catalysts without a sacrificial metal loading is of great significance but remains a challenge. In this work, we develop a facile and robust strategy for successfully preparing a highly dispersed supported nickel–molybdenum carbide (NiMo2C) bimetallic catalyst on mesoporous silica [NiMo2C/SBA-15(Glu.)], in which the renewable glucose is employed to serve as an assisting agent for high metal dispersion within the mesoporous channels of SBA-15 in the impregnation process and as a carbon source to replace flammable methane for metal carbide formation through a reductive carburization process. From diverse characterization results, the as-prepared NiMo2C/SBA-15(Glu.) catalyst demonstrates a much higher metal dispersion (ca. 4.1 nm in this work vs ca. 80 nm aggregates by the conventi...