Transfer Hydrogenation of Nitroarenes Catalyzed by CoCu Anchored on Nitrogen‐doped Porous Carbon

Abstract

The non‐precious metal catalysts with high catalytic activity is extremely desirable but still full of challenges. In this paper, CoCu bimetal immobilized on nitrogen‐doped porous carbon (CoCu‐N‐C) was prepared by an effective ligand‐stabilized pyrolysis strategy. CoCu‐N‐C exhibited excellent catalytic efficiency for the transfer hydrogenation of nitroarenes with ammonia borane as hydrogen source, which can be ascribed to the well dispersed metal nanoparticles, the synergetic interaction of CoCu bimetal and nitrogen‐doped carbon. The durability and recyclability experiments of the recycled CoCu‐N‐C catalyst indicated that no obvious change in catalytic performance was observed after five consecutive cycles. To gain insight into the catalytic mechanism of CoCu‐N‐C for the hydrogenation reaction, density functional theory calculations was also conducted. This work provides an universal approach for constructing highly efficient non‐precious metal heterogeneous catalysts and which may find diverse high performance applications.