MOF derived porous carbon supported Cu/Cu2O composite as high performance non-noble catalyst

• Porous carbon supported copper composite (Cu/Cu2O/C) is prepared.
• Cu3(BTC)2 is used as template and copper precursor to synthesize Cu/Cu2O/C.
• Nitrophenol is completely reduced within 160 s with tiny amount of Cu/Cu2O/C catalyst.
• The catalytic activity of Cu/Cu2O/C is comparable with noble metal nanoparticles.

Porous carbon supported copper composite (Cu/Cu2O/C) was synthesized with a facile, low cost and novel method and used as non-noble-metal catalyst for reduction of 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) to 4-aminophenol (4-AP) by NaBH4. In the synthetic strategy, metal organic framework Cu3(BTC)2 (also denoted as HKUST-1) was used as both sacrificial template and copper precursor, and phenol formaldehyde resin as carbon precursor. The catalytic Cu/Cu2O nanoparticles (Cu/Cu2O NPs) about 40 nm-in-diameter distributed uniformly both on the internal and external surface of the porous carbon flakes, and took up 33.38–37.56 wt% of the Cu/Cu2O/C composite. Compared with noble metal catalysts, the prepared composite showed comparable high catalytic activity, which was mainly due to their porous structure facilitating diffusion of reactants and products, and the high dispersion of accessible catalytic Cu/Cu2O NPs on porous carbon. Moreover, the synthesized catalyst can be reused for at least five cycles due to its good stability. These results confirmed that the as-prepared Cu/Cu2O/C is promising candidate to replace noble metal for catalytic application.

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