Ultrafine Pd Particles Embedded in Nitrogen-Enriched Mesoporous Carbon for Efficient H2 Production from Formic Acid Decomposition

Abstract

It remains a grand challenge to prepare highly efficient and stable Pd/C catalyst for catalytic H2 production from formic acid (FA). Here through a simple deposition-precipitation method, we constructed a catalyst of ultrafine Pd particles uniformly embedded in N-enriched mesoporous carbon (Pd/NMC) by integrating N-doping, mesopore confinement and small size effects into one composite. The results showed that Pd nanoparticles were distributed in a narrow range (1.2–1.4 nm) and evenly dispersed on the NMC with high dispersion (90%–96%) compared to Pd/MC with large size (∼8 nm). The content of N-containing functionalities, determined by XPS could reach as high as 18.7 at. %. More importantly, Pd/NMC demonstrated not only over 12 times higher H2 production amount than Pd/MC but also very promising stability (>95% retention efficiency within 4 cycles 8 h running) without any generation of a CO byproduct. It was also found that carbonization temperature of NMC greatly influenced the type and content of N speci...