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Atomic iron on mesoporous N-doped carbon to achieve dehydrogenation reaction at room temperature

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Abstract

Atomic non-noble metal materials show the potential to substitute noble metals in catalysis. Herein, melamine formaldehyde resin is developed to synthesize atomic iron on mesoporous nitrogen-doped carbon. The triazine units with abundant nitrogen content and cavity can realize effectively anchoring of single metal atoms. The atomic iron with unique charge and coordination characteristics shows superior catalytic performance in dehydrogenation reaction. Various N-heterocycles compounds and amines can be efficiently dehydrogenated into the corresponding products at room temperature, which is the mildest of all reported reaction conditions even when noble metal catalysts are considered. Therefore, development of atomic non-noble metal catalysts with mesoporous structure may provide an effective way to realize the substitution for noble metals in heterogeneous catalysis.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 21901007 and 21866032), and we acknowledge the BL12B beamline of National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) in Hefei and 1W1B station of Bei**g Synchrotron Radiation Facility (BSRF). Our work is completed on the “Explorer 100” cluster system of Tsinghua HPC Platform.

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  1. Zheng Chen and Wenjuan Yang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Functional Molecular Solids, Ministry of Education, Anhui Key Laboratory of Molecule-Based Materials, College of Chemistry and Materials Science, Anhui Normal University, Wuhu, 241000, China

    Zheng Chen

  2. International Collaborative Laboratory of 2D Materials for Optoelectronics Science and Technology of Ministry of Education, Institute of Microscale Optoelectronics, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China

    Wenjuan Yang

  3. Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Bei**g, 100084, China

    Yue Wu, Chao Zhang, Chen Chen & Yadong Li

  4. Center for Electron Microscopy, Tian** University of Technology, Tian**, 300384, China

    Jun Luo

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  1. Zheng Chen
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  2. Wenjuan Yang
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Correspondence to Zheng Chen.

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Chen, Z., Yang, W., Wu, Y. et al. Atomic iron on mesoporous N-doped carbon to achieve dehydrogenation reaction at room temperature. Nano Res. 13, 3075–3081 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-2975-6

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