Polymer-graphene hybride decorated Pt nanoparticles as highly efficient and reusable catalyst for the dehydrogenation of dimethylamine–borane at room temperature

Abstract

Addressed herein, we report a reduced graphene oxide (rGO) nanosheet coupled with polyaniline (PANI) for platinum (Pt) nanoparticles as supporting materials. The PANI-coupled rGO (PANI@rGO) nanosheet is prepared by a simple one-step chemical assembly strategy, and Pt nanoparticles are anchored on the support of PANI@rGO through the reaction of PANI with a platinum salt. The designed PANI efficiently exposes the surface of rGO sheets and stabilizes metal nanoparticles. Consequently, the Pt@PANI-rGO catalyst exhibits good reusability, durability and high catalytic performance for dimethylamine–borane dehydrogenation reaction. The structure morphology and properties of Pt@PANI-rGO NPs were characterized by using several different techniques such as UV–Vis, XPS, TEM, XRD and HR-TEM-EDX analyses. This newly prepared catalyst can be reused again at low concentrations and temperature. They showed a high turnover frequency (42.94 h−1) and low Ea value of 15.1 ± 2 kJ/mol for DMAB dehydrocoupling in the ambient conditions. The proposed nano architecture offers a new pathway to promote the performances of rGO in various applications; moreover, this work provides a powerful and universal synthetic strategy for such an architecture.