Nitrogen incorporation endows copper notable activity for the selective reduction of nitroarenes

Abstract

The selective reduction of nitroarenes to corresponding anilines using hydrazine hydrate as hydrogen carrier still focus on the employment of Fe and Co based materials as catalysts, while earth abundant and environmental friendly Cu based catalysts are rarely reported in this field. Herein, a cost-effective N modified Cu decorated on carbon nanotubes catalyst CuNCNT was designed and demonstrated comparable or better performance than many reported materials. It showed that N doping notably switched Cu from inactive to highly active, and the atomically dispersed Cu species were proposed to be the critical active sites. Moreover, the in-situ generated active [H] species derived from hydrazine decomposition was considered to be responsible for the reduction.